Social Cause Marketing

[CavySpirit]

Social Cause Marketing



Public opinion on PetsMart and PetCo’s “charities” seems to swing towards regarding these programs as a “step in the right direction.” However, in the context of ending the abuse of animals and solving the homeless pet population, the involvement of PetCo and PetsMart with animal rescues represents a destructive force – because these practices help to entrench an industry whose foundation rests on the suffering of animals. To put it simply, PetCo and PetsMart purchase their animals from pet mills where animals suffer from overcrowding, filthy conditions, disease, injury, inadequate or inappropriate food and water, complete absence of medical care, overbreeding to the point of death, and inhumane methods of euthanasia (such as putting live sick animals in freezers or in garbage bags filled with CO2, which are then tossed into the trash). PETA investigated and documented the terrible conditions at many of PetCo’s mills.

Since the 1980s, corporations have been heavily investing in what is called “Social Cause Marketing,” or “Venture Philanthropy.” This is a marketing technique that links a corporation to a public charity so that the corporation can improve its public image and extend its product recognition, thus generating more profit. Here is a basic primer in Social Cause Marketing :

What is Social Cause Marketing?

Note that the article says “Traditionally, the principal business goal of a cause-related marketing program has been to impact a company’s bottom line through increased sales.” Then the article goes on to enumerate other benefits that help a corporation enhance its reputation, increase its advertising, and keep customers.

The idea of Social Cause Marketing is not inherently more harmful than any other marketing ploy, in that they all seek to shape their product’s image in manipulative ways so that people will buy it. That is the nature of advertising. “Manipulative” in this sense means that advertisers seeks out peoples’ fears and desires (usually with the aid of R & D specialists who study the culture) in order to package their product as an answer to what the target audience wants and needs. For example, many advertisements capitalize on modern society’s fixation on romantic coupling; if you use a certain deodorant, whiten your teeth, or enroll in a certain weight loss program, you are more likely to find a romantic partner. This is why the advertisements often show affectionate couples at the end of the ad; the idea is that use of the product is now linked to romantic happiness.

Social Cause Marketing, instead of using the ideal of romantic happiness, utilizes the desire to contribute to society in a meaningful way to market its product and improve its image. This is why Social Cause Marketing is such a breakthrough for corporate business; it improves the status of the company in the process of attaching the product to a social desire. In many instances, charities will receive great benefit from partnering with corporations. Although the corporation may be using its “charitable” side to cover up unethical, dangerous, deceptive practices (for example, cigarette companies funding “stop smoking” campaigns), many could argue that the benefits received by the charity outweigh the harmful things that corporations in a capitalist economy might do.

This is not so, however, when Social Cause Marketing is used to distract the public from human rights violations or animal cruelty. When employed by a corporation whose practices violate human rights or injure animals, Social Cause Marketing 1) makes the partnering charity an accomplice to the corporation’s harmful behavior; 2) make the public complicit as well; and 3) by contributing to the corporation’s profits, it enables the company to do even more harm as it expands it’s business; and 4) it places the company further from culpability for its practices, because it is far more difficult to make accusations against a corporation that is perceived by the public as a friend to charities.

Marketing Suffering

Studies have shown that Social Cause Marketing creates windfall profits and vastly improved esteem for corporations that employ this tactic. PetsMart has enjoyed a period of intense expansion, in some part due to the benefits it has received by enjoining animal rescues to participate in its “charities.” Not only does PetsMart offer grants to animal rescues, it offers space for animal rescues to carry out adoptions and meet the public. These “adoption days” enable rescues to gain more recognition, raise more funds, and adopt out more animals. They help improve PetsMart promote its public image as a charitable foundation, rather than a for-profit business. Here is PetsMart boasting about how much they contribute to animal welfare:

http://www.petsmart.com/charities/index.shtml

PetCo has suddenly realized that PetsMart’s sales skyrocketed when it began engaging in Social Cause Marketing by ‘partnering’ with animal rescues. The increased foot traffic to the store on adoption days is in itself enough to give a sizeable boost to PetsMart’s sales. And although PetCo had allowed “adoption days” for years and also given many grants to animal rescues, its programs had nowhere near the sophistication of PetsMart’s “charities.” In an effort to catch up, PetCo partnered with PetFinder, a national adoption database, and last year released a statement that PetCo would encourage the public to “think adoption first” when seeking a pet. PetFinder in return promoted PetCo’s new slogan to rescuers, encouraging them to participate in PetCo’s “adoption days.”

Every weekend, rescues set up tables and playpens in PetCos and PetsMarts across the nation. They advertise the “adoption days” on their website and in local newspapers, and many rescues draw quite a crowd. The public, of course, is thrilled to be able to visit puppies and kittens (animals that PetCo and PetsMart do not sell) and shop for their own pets at the same time. Many people who go to visit the rescuers meander into the store and wind up purchasing novelty items from the numerous shelves packed with colorful toys, dishes, pet beds, pet clothes, and just about everything one might want to pamper a pet.

Public opinion on PetsMart and PetCo’s “charities” seems to swing towards regarding these programs as a “step in the right direction.” However, in the context of ending the abuse of animals and solving the homeless pet population, the involvement of PetCo and PetsMart with animal rescues represents a destructive force – because these practices help to entrench an industry whose foundation rests on the suffering of animals.

To put it simply, PetCo and PetsMart purchase their animals from pet mills where animals suffer from overcrowding, filthy conditions, disease, injury, inadequate or inappropriate food and water, complete absence of medical care, overbreeding to the point of death, and inhumane methods of euthanasia (such as putting live sick animals in freezers or in garbage bags filled with CO2, which are then tossed into the trash). PETA has investigated and documented the terrible conditions at many of PetCo’s mills. Here is a link to the latest story: http://www.peta.org/feat/napd/

Two workers in a southern California pet mill reported the following horrors at a rescuer’s conference:

• Overcrowding to the point of animals living on top of each other

• Babies coated in feces only minutes after being born

• Sick, injured and dying animals left to suffer in the general population

• Dead animals decomposing in cages with live animals

• Drip water systems that flood cages and kill dozens of animals

• Animals running loose on the floors

• Rampant skin conditions among the animals

• Crude gas chambers used for euthanasia in which animals suffer for hours

• Animals without any food eating other animals

This facility was investigated by the USDA (a pet mill has to be VERY bad to get an APHIS investigation) and allowed to continue to operate after “cleaning up” the premises. USDA standards for the wholesale pet industry are notoriously low and the laws are not usually enforced. Hundreds of “inspected” pet mills are still operating in the U.S.

This was not just an isolated incident. The pet mill system, where animals are treated as stock and warehoused, transported, distributed and put on sale floors like merchandise, is fundamentally based on the suffering of animals. There are, and can not be, any “good” pet mills, any more than there can be good sweatshops or good concentration camps. And that’s what these mills are. Death camps for animals.

How the Cycle of Suffering Works

The fact is, PetCo and PetSmart contribute to animal suffering by purchasing animals from pet mills. Every time they sell an animal, the following process happens:

1. The absence of the animal is marked as a lack of inventory;

2. The retail store places an order to the distributor for another animal to fill its place;

3. The distributor fills the order, thus leaving a vacancy at the warehouse;

4. The absence of the animal at the warehouse is marked as a lack of inventory;

5. The distributor places an order to the manufacturer for another animal to fill its place

6. Another animal is bred to meet the demands of the distributor and retail store;

7. Another animal enters the pet mill, and must fight for its life by navigating the filth, overcrowding, disease, malnutrition, and stress before it is finally shipped to the retail pet dealer – IF THE ANIMAL SURVIVES.

A good deal of the PetCo and PetsMart animals arrive sick, and employees are not skilled in caring for them. The veterinarians used by PetCo and PetsMart are not often skilled in exotics medicine, and therefore the majority of the sick animals in these stores will die, often alone in back rooms where they have been forgotten. Some of the sick animals will be sold, either knowingly or unknowingly, to an unsuspecting public that is uneducated on their care. Often these sick animals die soon after purchase. So the abuse and neglect of the pet mill stretches the suffering far beyond the warehouse facility itself.

The more money PetCo and PetsMart makes from its Social Cause Marketing, the more stores they can open, the more animals they will purchase, and the more pet mills will spring up. They undeniably, irrevocably contribute to the suffering of animals by keeping the pet mills running.

The more esteem PetCo and PetsMart receive from their Social Cause Marketing, the more difficult it becomes for animal welfare advocates to make accusations about the horrible practices in the pet mills and the neglect that often happens in the stores themselves.

The more rescues participate in PetCo and PetsMart “charities,” the more entrenched these corporations become in the cycle of pet mill suffering.

The participation of rescues in the Social Cause Marketing programs of PetCo and PetSmart results in nothing less than weakening of the cause of animal welfare. Pragmatically speaking, you cannot make progress by contributing to the problem you are trying to solve. No matter how hard you try, you will never put out the fire if you are throwing more matches in.

Many rescuers may feel that participating in PetCo and PetSmart “charities” is justified because PetCo and PetsMart do not normally sell dogs and cats. They view the sacrifice of thousands of guinea pigs, chinchillas, rabbits, rats, mice, hamsters, birds, and reptiles as a small price to pay for increasing dog and cat adoptions. However, make no mistake about it, when you sacrifice one animal, you compromise all others because you contribute to a hierarchy of animals that often is at the root of institutionalized forms of abuse.

As long as rescuers participate in PetCo and PetsMart’s Social Cause Marketing program while quietly accepting the practice of purchasing animals from pet mills, they are accomplices in the suffering caused by the pet mills. Many rescuers will take offense to this, but none have yet attempted to refute the facts.

These mills will continue to operate until enough opposition is raised to the process of pet milling for retail sale. This has become a race against the clock as PetCo and PetsMart shore up their corporations with the benefits received from their Social Marketing Programs. Soon, this process will become irreversible and these corporations will become entwined with a charitable purpose in the public mind for good. Those who question the charitable purpose will be cast aside, and the pet mills will roll on quietly, cranking out their millions of suffering, miserable creatures to face an uncertain fate.

Please don’t accept the false image that PetCo and PetsMart are promoting of themselves as charitable institutions that help animals.

Please don’t avert your eyes from the suffering because participating in these programs serves an immediate end.

Please don’t help PetCo and PetsMart institutionalize the suffering of animals

Stand up today and say, “I refuse to enable the suffering of animals with my silent agreement.” Speak up while you can still be heard.

[CavySpirit]

This is cool. When I create or release an article on the main site, I can have it automatically create a copy of the article as a thread for discussion.

This was an article by Nikki on the old cavywelfare site that's been saved and moved here. It needs a bit of updating.

[mypigpen]

T, if I am over stepping by posting here, please remove it.

I want to add another pet store to the above mentioned. PetSupermarket.com

This store is based in Fl and has worked its way into GA. Savannah now has a branch that opened about two weeks ago. we went hoping to find a store that was not selling live animals. Not only does it sell live animals, but it sells them for almost half of what PetsMart is selling them for. I don't know if this was a new store gimmick or not. Guinea pigs are priced at a mere $18. Pigs and dwarf buns are together sharing the same food. When I questioned about them being housed together I was quickly told that that is the way they are shipped! I was caught off guard and didn't think until later about the food issue. We left and vowed never to give them a cent.

Their Social cause Marketing scheme is in store vaccination day:
PetSupermarket.com

[wendys treasurenook]

Just a bit of information for you. When I purchased my four piggies at the pet store (Petsmart) I never thought to question their capabilities, so I got my four piggies and brought them home. They were all housed together in super sized cages, we make them ourselves. A few months later, we find out that two of the pigs we bought are girls and yes, they both were pregnant. They said they only housed and sold boy guinea pigs. I was livid. I called the manager of our local petsmart and the only response I got was that they would take the babies once they were born if I wanted them to. They said they would send them back to the breeder until they got big enough to sell (yeah right). They acted like it was a common occurance and no big deal. My children and I and of course our piggies went through alot of stress. We had to build seperate cages for the girls and boys, find homes for some of the babies and one of the babies were stillborn. My children cried and cried because we couldn't keep all the babies, but we already had two other pigs besides the four we had gotten at the petstore. It was such a stressfull event and The pet store didn't bat an eye, or care one bit. I have learned not to buy guinea pigs, but adopt them instead because the pet store don't know anymore than I do about guinea pigs. They are not specialists, they are just ordinary people, who don't care and don't know much about pigs themselves. I was very displeased that I had to learn things the hard way. Hope this helps somone else out and they won't make the same mistake I made.

[Meredeth]

I agree with this completely
after 2 months of trying to find skinny pig breeders and haveing no one respond to us we went to SuperPet here in Ontario
well we bought 2 boys who are the best pets in the world
not 2 months of having them I come home on Friday after class and Karl is lying on his side drooling perfusly
he ended up passing on monday morning from Neurological problems, we also found out in that weekend that Karl; had Scoliosis so bad even if he didnt pass we would have had to think about euthenasia anyways.
I went back Yesterday to tell them and the Manager of small animals dept. took me into the Quarentene room and showed me another sick Skinny at which I told her to take herto the vet although i knew it wouldnt happen
There needs to be more regulation on where these animals are coming from wheter its cats dogs guineas, rabits, ect.
it is definetly not fair to the animals that are suffering at all

on that note I am still purchasing from them although it breaks mny heart to can anyone recommend a good SAFE on-line place to get bedding, food, ect.
thanks

[stephenlawrence]

It seems like the petstore's desire to have rescues in their stores for PR reasons is an opportunity to get them to change. Basically, organize the local resuces into saying, sure we'll hold adoptions at your store, but we'll just need you to to meet this list of requirements. If you're not interested, we'll be perfectly happy to not to hold adoptions at your stores.

Basically, use their desire to improve their image get them to change. Create contracts with them that are legally binding, and have specific consequences when broken. Make the contract available to all rescues so they can be sure to get it signed before they hold adoptions. The contract should include the right for the rescue to inspect the store to determine that the requirements are being met.

I'm sure the pet stores won't go for it, but at least then you have clear documentation that you can present to the public that they were offered an option to participate in humane animal treatment, and turned it down. This creates evidence that there "social cause marketing" is a bunch of corporate BS. I'm sure various local news channels would love a story about petsmart not allowing a large area rescue to hold adoptions at their stores because petsmart was unwilling to meet the rescue's very basic animal welfare requirements.

[cielo]

I would like to link the info to another group, Is it okay?