The Selling of Breast Cancer

摘要

Corporate America's taking up of the breast cancer banner has meant that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised for research and awareness about the disease. No one knows the exact dollar figures; companies provide their own unaudited numbers and count contributions in different ways. But the corporate embrace of the cause has spawned a lucrative market for companies eager to build valuable brand loyalty. Charity or not, this is a market with many of the features of elbows-out battling for share: turf struggles, digs at the competition, one-upmanship, and a fierce drive for results. Those results have to be about more than finding a cure. As one manager who has been involved in a high-profile breast cancer campaign puts it, "When you're spending from your marketing bud- get and not your philanthropy budget, you have to look for that return on investment." All of this raises questions about just whose purposes are being served, and how well. For one thing, the jockeying by so many companies to lash their images to breast cancer drains resources away from many other worthy causes, including other diseases that kill far more women. And while corporate marketing efforts have no doubt raised awareness of breast cancer, the packaging of the disease may have oversimplified some of the complex medical and social issues surrounding it, and even influenced the direction of research in potentially damaging ways. Some companies, for their part, now see breast cancer as too crowded a cause and have rejected it in fa- vor of others where the competition is less likely to drown out their message. "Over the past 10 years, breast cancer has become pink. It's pretty. It's not about the hard stuff, and it's not about controversy. And there's a lot of controversy," says Fran Visco, head of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an activist group that recently launched a campaign to get women to lobby Congress―instead of just shopping―to fight the disease. Indeed, at a time when more companies than ever are eager to score points with a public sick of corporate scandal, the seemingly win-win equation of the business of breast cancer turns out to pose thorny challenges for almost everyone involved.