An All-Consuming Cause: Breast Cancer, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Market for Generosity

Citizen service belongs to no party, to no ideology. It is an American idea, which every American should embrace.

--Bill Clinton, President's Summit on America's Future, 1997

In the past, perhaps the wife of the CEO was particularly concerned about Alzheimer's so the company would donate money to that cause. The big sea change came when companies realized that this is actually corporate strategy. Now, the question about charity is, can it support corporate business?

--Carol Cone, cause-related marketing consultant

In an oft-recited story, Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, tells how she approached an executive of a lingerie manufacturer to suggest that they include a tag in their bras reminding customers to get regular mammograms. In response, the executive told Brinker, "We sell glamour. We don't sell fear. Breast cancer has nothing to do with our customers" (Davidson 1997, 36). The fortunes of Brinker and the Komen Foundation have clearly changed since 1984, when this event is said to have taken place. Nancy Brinker is now recognized as a pioneer of cause-related marketing, and the Komen Foundation has over a dozen national sponsors, a "million dollar council" comprising businesses that donate at least $1 million per year, and a slew of other corporate partnerships at both the local and national levels (Davidson 1997). The foundation even has a contract with a lingerie company--Wacoal--to manufacture an "awareness bra" (Frontline 1999, 10). ¹

The transformation of the American public's attitude to breast cancer is a central theme in the contemporary proliferation of academic and popular discourse on the disease. Maren Klawiter (2000), for instance, argues that a destigmatization of breast cancer in U.S. culture has occurred as new social spaces, solidarities, and sensibilities among breast cancer survivors and activists have emerged from the multiplication of treatment regimens, the proliferation of support groups, and the expansion of screening into asymptomatic populations in the past twenty years. Breast cancer scholars, however, understandably committed to focusing on the resistive strategies of grassroots activism and to charting substantive changes in the funding and regulation of breast cancer research, screening, and treatment, have tended to avoid the role played by breast cancer-related marketing in this transformation. ² Yet, over the past ten years, upbeat and optimistic breast cancer campaigns have become a central and integral part of the marketing strategy of numerous large and high-profile corporations. Avon, BMW, Bristol Myers Squibb, Estée Lauder, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, General Motors, J. C. Penney, Kelloggs, Lee Jeans, and the National Football League have all turned to breast cancer philanthropy as a new and profitable strategy through which to market their products. Moreover, the nonprofit and advocacy groups with which they have aligned themselves--most frequently, the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation--are two of the largest, most high-profile arms of the breast cancer movement in the United States.

The emergence of breast cancer-related marketing is just one (albeit prominent and instructive) example of a major change in corporate approaches to both philanthropy and marketing in the past two decades. During this period, corporate philanthropy has been transformed from a relatively random, eclectic, and unscientific activity to a highly calculated and measured strategy that is integral to a business's profit-making function. While work in cultural studies has analyzed the ways in which subjects learn and practice moral and civic virtue through practices of consumption (Miller and Rose 1997; Rose 1999) and examined the ways in which corporations align themselves with social causes in order to shape their reputations as good citizens (Cole 1996; Scott 1993; Sturken 1997; Yúdice 1995), less attention has been paid either to the specific historical conditions that allowed for the emergence of strategic philanthropy and cause-related marketing or to the rationales and...