By Arnica Rowan
Voices buzz throughout the room. Students are perched on chairs and tables like budgies, chatting excitedly about their ideas. I'm moving from group to group, listening in on their conversations and, occasionally, prompting their discussions.
It's an afternoon class at Lakeland College in Vermilion, near Lloydminster, where I taught for five years in the School of Business and Tourism. My adventure tourism students, never quiet because they'd rather be in kayaks than a classroom, are working on their business plans. They've created fictional businesses and are mapping out their approaches to marketing, human resources and financial management. Today's assignment is to decide how their companies are going to contribute to their communities.
I hear lots of possibilities while drifting around the room: sponsor a little league team, donate a percentage of proceeds to Ducks Unlimited, offer discounted holidays to low-income, single-parent families. Corporate social responsibility or CSR isn't a difficult concept to explain to twentysomethings – if you depend on a community to make your livelihood, you should give something back in return. My students take this as a given. I challenge them to think about which charities would be the most meaningful to their make-believe customers, about which connections will also yield strong financial returns.
When the conversation begins to lull, I draw their attention to my PowerPoint presentation at the front of the room. "Doing good in your community," the slide says, "is also good for business."
"Let me introduce you to another concept," I say as I settle onto one of the tables. "I call it 'redwashing.' It's similar to greenwashing. Has anybody here heard that term?"
Amanda, a hemp-wearing, dreadlocked student, jumps in. "It's when companies who aren't really that environmentally conscious hype up their one green project and try to paint the entire company with a green brush." She smiles, then frowns. "Pisses me off."
"Exactly," I say. "I'd like to show you some companies that I think are redwashing. In other words, businesses that are taking way too much credit for their social contributions and getting more bang out of their social marketing buck than the charities."
I click on the slide and a red iPod flashes onto the screen. "Apple, Motorola, the Gap and three other companies formed something called the (Red) campaign last year," I begin. (The round brackets are part of their branding, but I'm not going to use them from here on in. Nor will I type things like :) which piss me off.) "They developed and promoted new red coloured products, and some of the proceeds are donated to the Global Fund for the fight against AIDS. When you buy a red iPod, $10 goes to the Global Fund, which is a huge private-public partnership that was formed in 2002 to step up the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria."
"How much money did those companies raise?" interrupts my Self-Appointed Principle Antagonist (SAPA), an intelligent, mutinous, second-year student.
"Well, that's my beef," I answer. "With celebrity sponsorship out the yin-yang and a full-hour promotion on Oprah, the Red campaign only donated $11 million last year. Motorola alone cleared $3.7 billion in profits. They donated $7 million from their red cellphone sales. I think these companies have made a marketing mountain out of a donation molehill."
The students murmur amongst themselves.
"I sure as hell wouldn't go out and buy a new iPod just because it's red," says Amanda. "I'd just donate $10 instead."
"Yeah, but you bought one of those Aldo necklaces," SAPA, her roommate, counters, referring to the leather string and metal dog tag Amanda wears around her neck – a $5 "empowerment" tag sold by the shoe company, with 100% of net proceeds going to an organization called YouthAIDS. "Same dif," continues SAPA. "It just makes you feel good that you're buying something that goes to a cause. You probably wouldn't have bought it otherwise."
Category: Money
