Why give to charity when you can shop at Sainsbury’s instead?
Howard Lake | 29 January 2008 | Blogs
My girlfriend Sarah and I were doing our weekly shop at our local Sainsbury’s on Sunday. Now Sarah (Wheeler) works for an animal welfare charity (WSPA, where she is international head of leadership giving – cool job title!).
One of Sarah’s areas of interests – or rather concern – is that many companies are adopting the marketing messages of charities by promoting the feelgood factor of shopping with them rather than the products themselves.
Up until this weekend, Sarah’s paradigm example had been The Body Shop. The Body Shop has now been replaced by Sainsbury’s, where our local branch (and presumably all the others) had a huge pendant hanging from the ceiling announcing: “Our values make us different.”
(As an aside, it would be an interesting branding exercise to pick a member of Sainsbury’s staff at random and ask them what these values are and why they make Sainsbury’s different.)
Sainsbury’s is also running a press campaign and a full-page advert informed that, because Sainsbury’s free range Woodland Eggs were laid by hens that are free to roam in the woods, “this means a better life for the hens and a clearer conscience for you”.
Of course, organic food costs more, quite a lot more (I know that having just moved in with someone who works for WSPA). Although far from explicitly stated, Sainsbury’s values marketing is strongly implying that this price premium is worth paying, not because you get a better product, or because that product is better for you, but because:
a) you help to make the world a better place
b) you feel good about yourself.
Isn’t that the message fundraisers endeavour to communicate?
We all know average monthly donations are in the region of £10-12. In 2004, the sorely-missed Giving Campaign commissioned some market research by NOP among higher rate tax-payers – the “mass affluent” (www.givingcampaign.org.uk/images/uploaded/7%20-%20A%20Wealth%20of%20Opportunity.pdf). This found that people metaphorically put their monthly expenditure into three pots – one for fixed items such as bills and mortgage payments, one for variable regular outgoings such as housekeeping, and one for “purely discretionary” expenditure, which included charitable giving.
This last pot for discretionary expenditure was regularly squeezed by everything the ‘mass affluent’ had to do to maintain their lifestyles so that, seemingly paradoxically, they often felt they didn’t have much to give away. (It’s just a gut feeling but I reckon the ‘mass affluent’ are among the most likely to consider organic food part of their lifestyle.)
Now, out of which pot will people pay the organic food premium – shopping (monthly variable pot), or charity (discretionary pot)? I don’t think it is at all obvious that it will come from the ‘shopping’ pot, especially if what has convinced them to stump up this extra cost is a marketing message that is associated with charities.
Now factor this in. In 2003, Peter Halfpenny at Manchester University did some research on what people understand by ‘charitable giving’ (see Professional Fundraising, mid-March 2004). His conclusions were that many people lump together – conflate, in fact – all their expenditure that could be categorised as having an element of, as he described it, “meeting social commitments”. Alongside traditional charitable giving, this includes such ‘giving’ as buying the Big Issue, trade union subscriptions and even contributing to a colleague’s leaving present.
It is easy to see how buying organic food could fall under the category of ‘social commitment expenditure’. And if this expenditure comes out of the ‘charity pot’…well, we already know the money in that pot is being squeezed in all directions and you can’t spend the same money on two different things.
As Sarah said, if you are already doing your bit for animal welfare by shopping at Sainsbury’s, why would you also give to an animal welfare charity?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.