By Ryan Downey

 

Popular brands are tricking consumers into buying more while putting our conscience at ease. Through a marketing ploy known as one-for-one marketing, brands promise that through your purchase, you can help in-need families with a matched donation of a similar product. This marketing scheme was made popular by TOMS shoes, who promises, “for every pair sold, TOMS will donate another pair to women and children in need.” At a glance this seems like an ethical and charitable business model. Upon closer inspection crippling social and economic issues arise, along with detrimental ecological outcomes and dark ethical implications for producers.

 

Sure, donating a pair of shoes with every purchase will initially help in need families more than the alternative of not donating a pair of shoes, but we must examine the motives of one-for-one donations, and the background effects at play. Many issues face global in-need populations like food scarcity, water scarcity, healthcare access, and opportunity to education to name a few. For-profit-corporations like Toms, who accrue nearly $400 million in transactions annually, have huge potential to help in-need communities combat the issues they face. André Gorz describes corporate motives in Ecology as Politics as driven by profit, and negligent to consumers: “Corporate management is not, for instance, principally concerned with making work more pleasant, harmonizing production with the balance of nature and the lives of people, or ensuring that its products serve only those ends which communities have chosen for themselves. It is principally concerned with producing the maximum exchange value for the least monetary cost …. [Corporate production] must give greater weight to lowering the costs of production than to preserving the ecological balances, whose destruction will not burden the firm financially. It must produce what can be sold at the highest prices, regardless of whether cheaper things might be more valuable to the community” (5). As Gorz highlights, Toms motivation behind one-for-one marketing is not to address the needs of in-need communities and lacks consideration of the ecological consequences of their production, or the value of the goods they are donating. One-for-one is a label slapped on typical capitalistic production that sensationalizes consumption and takes advantage of in-need communities for an upper hand in our market economy.

 

Ecological Impact

Not only does this market structure accentuate social problems like unemployment and adversely affect local economies, it also incentivizes higher rates of consumerism. Customers are more likely to shop at brands who have moral or ethical incentives backing their goods than those who do not. By increasing the face value incentive to shop at TOMS and producing two pairs of shoes instead of one, programs result in a higher rate of resource consumption. Often donated shoes act as a replacement and do not actually change the frequency of shoe ownership, adding to faster growing landfills without significant positive impacts (Reed).

 

Social Impact

Beyond lacking honorable motives or ecological responsibility, one-for-one marketing has negative social and economic impacts for the communities receiving donations. Often there is a local economy surrounding the products that are donated, and large donation programs like Toms displace manufacturers. As manufacturers lose business employment rates decline, as much as 50% in some cases (Frazer, abstract). As employment declines and local economies suffer, the risk of aid-dependency grows, and one-for-one donation programs often have short-term partnerships resulting in overall negative, or net-zero impacts on communities (Reed). Although adverse effects are more prominent, another study shows slight improvement in outdoor activities and school attendance in children who receive apparel donations, but the increase is insignificant (Wydick et, al). Research has also shown that Toms and other one-for-one customers may be less likely to make philanthropic contributions to other well-founded organizations because of the clean conscience they are left with after donating generating purchase. We cannot emphasize enough that this marketing structure capitalizes on in-need communities and harms their local economy while earning a profit in the name of “philanthropy.”

 

Alternatives

If someone desires to help mitigate social and environmental challenges facing in-need communities, they should consider donating directly to an organization that is involved with local communities, with boots on the ground, or volunteering time directly.

 

Frazer, G. (2008), Used‐Clothing Donations and Apparel Production in Africa*. The Economic Journal, 118: 1764-1784.

 

Gorz, André (1980), “Ecology and Freedom.” In: Ecology and Politics, Southend Press, 1980.

 

Russel Reed (2017), One-for-None: Aid Dependency and the “TOMS Model.” Harvard Political Review, International.

 

Bruce Wydick, Elizabeth Katz, Flor Calvo, Felipe Gutierrez, Brendan Janet, Shoeing the Children: The Impact of the TOMS Shoe Donation Program in Rural El Salvador, The World Bank Economic Review, Volume 32, Issue 3, October 2018, Pages 727–751,