Buying stuff, saving lives: a critical account of product (RED)'s Economics of Attention

• Mattson, Craig E. ^[1]
  1. [1] Trinity Christian College

     Trinity Christian College

     Township of Worth, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Southern communication journal, ISSN 1041-794X, Vol. 77, nº 3, 2012, págs. 216-238
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Cause-related marketing (CRM) has long sought both to raise and to complicate consumer awareness, fostering a shifting attention between consumption and philanthropy. This essay examines one successful CRM, the Product RED campaign, which, though largely ignored by rhetorical critics so far, engages concerns vital to rhetorical studies, including the relation of everyday material practices to identity formation. This essay's rhetorical analysis of the campaign's two major mission statements, the RED Manifesto and the RED Idea, shows how CRM's flexible attention can foster a consumer identity formation that is flexibly amenable to both ordinary and crisis experience and yet that may also prove hard for consumers to sustain because it subtracts recalcitrance from lived experience.