Is it appropriate to use the suffering of others for the marketing of products? It would seem cancer is a great disease for selling anything from carpets to bottled water. From stuffing yourself with several courses of food and washing it down with the best champagne it would seem nothing is to over the top when it comes to raising funds for terminal illness.
Not so Mchappy
McDonalds uses the hard luck story of thousands of sick and dying kids to sell more burgers to an already over weight population that should be discouraged rather than enticed to eating energy dense, low fiber high fat food. Mchappy day sold over 1 million burgers to well intentioned Australians with the promotional spin that $1 dollar from every burger will go to charity. Ronald McDonald house the charity flag ship gives Macca’s the credibility it needs to continue feeding the overfed, increasing not only waist lines but also McDonalds profits.
Nestle told to stick it!
In 2004 Nestlé’s was politely told by a leading breast cancer charity to stick their $1.5 million dollar charity deal, that doesn’t happen very often. This particular charity declined the lucrative deal based on Nestlé’s continued promotion of baby formula to third world in the face of conclusive evidence that breast feed children do better than their formula fed counterparts.
Profits before health
Cause Related Marketing (CRM), where the business pays to link their products to good causes brings into question the biggest areas of charitable giving.(CRM products are bought every second in the UK to the sum of 50 million pounds in 2003) “There needs to be integrity, sincerity and transparency on both sides otherwise it can rebound on both parties ‘Unfortunately in the real world formula fed third world babies with a lack of clean water are suffering from high infection rates and death is rife. Breastfeeding is also shown to decrease the risk of breast cancer by 4.3%; formula feeding has managed to help increase Nestlé’s profits to 8.7 million pounds. It may be better to make the donation direct rather than via a multinationals cash register.
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