With Government, Less Is More
CVS as a case study in how outdated our federal government really is.
Issues around the effectiveness of government have received increased attention as a result of the Trump presidency. Of course, conservatives and Trump have generally advocated for a smaller government. However, as we head toward another potential government shutdown, many conservatives and non-conservatives alike are asking, could we do more with less government?
Most government functions are woefully outdated — they are specialized and siloed based on their 19th century origins, whereas today’s society is much more interconnected and fast-paced.
Although we are barely two weeks into the first month of the new year, retail giant CVS Pharmacy took a bold step in front of the government, empowering women in the process, by deciding to end airbrushing and photoshopping of beauty images in its marketing campaigns by 2020.
CVS is banking on the effectiveness of corporate social marketing as a way to both connect with their customer base and implement desired cultural change.
The terms “corporate social marketing” and “corporate social responsibility” were first used in 2004, by scholars Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee, who defined the concepts as “a powerful strategy that uses marketing principles and techniques to foster behavior[ral] change.”
In the US, government is often an ineffective means to do just that; although we often legislate rules to incentivize certain types of behavior, the checks and balances built into our system often cause any legislative efforts to lag far behind public opinion. To this end, there is still a wage gap despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and laws pertaining to women’s health are routinely decided by committees comprised of solely male members.
Although other countries have legislated the exact behavior that CVS is now requiring, including Israel in 2012 and France in 2017, i.e., requiring a disclaimer to appear on images that have been retouched, it is unlikely that we would ever see such legislation in the US.
Ultimately, this is something we should be okay with; the private sector is typically more effective in implementing change than legislation anyway.
First, Congress currently has enough troubles passing routine laws such as budgets and renewals of expiring authorities, so it’s unlikely to get much else done beyond that. Second, giving the government the authority to dictate what is or is not a socially harmful image sounds a lot like Big Brother, which Americans notoriously detest. Moreover, it’s unclear if advertisers’ right to free speech, which Americans notoriously adore, would supersede the indirect harm that some women feel when constantly bombarded with the airbrushed perfection of fashion and beauty advertisements in the eyes of the law.
There’s also the greater issue that, despite some increase in diversity over the past few years, our lawmakers are still overwhelmingly white men, many of whom are already eligible for Social Security retirement income. (Out of 435 Members in the US House of Representatives, 352 are men, 90% are white, and their average age is 59).
As a whole, older white men are less sympathetic to the possible harm retouched fashion and beauty ads may cause, since they typically aren’t the targets of such advertisements, making it an unlikely legislative priority for our current lawmakers. (By contrast, 80 percent of CVS’s five million daily shoppers are women.)
And similarly, despite the eradication of those accused of sexual harassment from Hollywood and the media, there has not been a successful purge of those accused of sexual harassment from government and politics.
Ideally, when society puts pressure on the government to act, and it fails to do so, corporations step in to lead the change. Although when the term corporate social marketing was first used, some were skeptical of the private sector’s ability to look beyond profits, the case for social corporate responsibility has proven this to be incorrect.
And, part of why this is so? Because of the increasing role of women on corporate leadership teams.
As was recently noted in a study by Catalyst and Harvard Business School, companies with more women in leadership are better practitioners of corporate social responsibility. This includes CVS, who’s female president of Pharmacy, Helena Foulkes, ultimately made the decision to ban retouched photos.
According to Foulkes, the move away from retouched images was “really a response to the bigger conversation women are having over their own level of empowerment in society.” She made no mention of what impact this would have on cosmetic sales, proving that corporate social marketing can not only be effective, but also genuine. (It should be noted that CVS also chose to discontinue the sale of tobacco products in 2014, in another move that shows the legitimacy of the brand’s dedication to corporate social marketing). In addition, its unlikely that Foulkes’s male counterparts were as in-tuned to the bigger conversation women were having that she referenced.
And, as a result of Foulkes’s experience as a woman and CVS’s decision to ban retouched photos, CVS has received a plethora of positive press for taking the lead in furthering the conversation about women’s empowerment.
It’s also of note that CVS Pharmacy’s announcement was made on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. One of Mr. King’s famous quotations is that “there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
It appears that, in 2018, the time is right to embrace less government, and trust in corporate social responsibility.
