What is wrong with giving $160 million in five years to combat AIDS and other diseases in Africa that are killing millions of people?
Plenty, write Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte in Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World, just out from the University of Minnesota Press.
The book is a blunt, skeptical analysis of the emergence of a celebrity-driven, feel-good, “compassionate consumption” model of raising funds for international aid projects.
The two Denmark-based scholars focus on the high-profile Product RED campaign in which wealthy merchandising brands—among them American Express, Apple, Armani, Converse, Gap, Hallmark, Starbucks, and Bugaboo, the deluxe baby-stroller maker—encourage consumers to buy their products because the companies donate some of their profits to help the African ill.
RED member organizations cooperate on stylish, splashy advertising campaigns and promote their messages with such items as RED-branded Gap t-shirts, iPods, and American Express cards.
The RED initiative’s co-founder, Bono—leader of the Irish rock band U2—announced the initiative at the 2006 World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort Davos, and then appeared at celebrity launches, such as one for the Armani clothing line. There he proclaimed: “You buy a RED product over here; the company buys lifesaving drugs for someone who can’t afford them, over there [in Africa]. That’s it. So why not shop ’til it [AIDS] stops? Why not try some off-the-rack enlightenment?”
The book’s authors argue that the campaign’s message is dual: do good by consuming, and don’t bother to think too much about philanthropy. Richey, a professor of international development studies at Roskilde University, and Ponte, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, characterize the approach as “Brand Aid.” They explain: “It is aid to brands” because it boosts sales by building brand value.
The authors suggest that Product RED exemplifies the Brand Aid approach better than any other campaign. Crucially, they note, celebrities like Bono, suddenly experts on international aid, serve as salesmen who appeal to consumers to come join them on the cutting edge of modern lifestyle, culture, and identity.
Be good and look good, too. No need to volunteer, nor be active in social movements; just buy.
“The beauty of this celebrity simplification,” they write, “is that it provides the possibility that everyday people can engage in low-cost heroism.” In the Brand Aid world view, “it is possible to have as much as you want without depriving anyone else.”
Product RED’s $160-million in donations has gone to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, an independent organization, and has amounted to about one percent of the fund’s budget. Rather than run medical-care programs itself, The Global Fund provides funding to organizations that do.
So, isn’t that good?
Ponte and Richey allow that, yes, the funding boost to The Global Fund is; but they express several concerns. One is that the Brand Aid approach de-emphasizes corporate social responsibility—for example, improving wages and work conditions in factories, or mitigating environmental damage—and instead suggests that helping distant, suffering, deserving others is enough. They believe that buying without due consciousness of what is being bought amounts to a sort of neocolonial consumerism. To make matters worse, they say, consumers are effectively discouraged from becoming much more aware of the real daily struggles of sick Africans, or of how poverty, trading and production inequalities, and other third world stressors come about.
The authors further object that under the new approach, recipients of aid do not sustainably make or grow anything that they can trade to build their own lives, but instead become distant, passive recipients who are condescendingly characterized as “good AIDS victims”—mothers and children, for example—as distinct from, say, troublesome AIDS activists.
“Causumerism” also breaks the link between capitalist production and global poverty, the authors contend. Rather than wonder whether consumerism creates global inequities, Brand Aid campaigns urge them to shop more: to engage in a form of “just capitalism” reminiscent of the industrial robber barons of earlier times—Carnegies and Rockefellers who deigned to favor their fellow citizens with some of what they had won according to the hard rules of commerce.
That, Richey and Ponte say, suits corporations like those taking part in Product RED just fine. Barely altering their business model, they improve their ethical profile and protect themselves against consumer activism of a more critical, less glamour-and-celebrity-dazzled variety.
And, Ponte and Richey say, they doubt that the Brand Aid model will prove sustainable in the years after it has disrupted other approaches—those years when the star power of its celebrity advocates fades.
No response, yet, from Bono.—Peter Monaghan