Companies are now attempting to outdo each other with major acts of generosity, but there’s a catch; they’ll do good as long as they can make sure their customers know about it. There is no room for humility when a brand does a good deed. They’re always Larry David and never the anonymous donor.

    It’s difficult to separate the fact that while these brands are showcasing pedigree social responsibility, ultimately they are helping refugees because it sells milky lattes and cheap holiday accommodation. They can see that allocating their marketing budget to good causes has a better reach than spending that money elsewhere right now.



bioemerl:

Society is the result of lots of peoples decisions that take into account many many variables. To say that society makes a decision is not society making a decision because it is driven by profit motive is like saying a human making a decision isn't really making that decision because you can rip open their head and track the firing of their neurons to determine exactly why they said what they did.

End point: Companies sell activism because people demand it. Companies allocate money and get money from activism because people want activism. This results in activism happening where it wouldn't have, and skews us into a more accepting or more generally helpful society.

That's not a false reality, just like it isn't a false reality that society will happily maim and murder and kill while having only honest and kind intent. Why do we look at the outcome of one, and the intent of the other?


posted 2632 days ago