JustGetThere

This month, like every October, a sea of pink ribbons washes over products from sneakers to snacks. While the effort raises research dollars, it leaves some breast cancer survivors feeling that companies are profiting from their pain.

By Kris Frieswick

Boston Globe | When Kim Zielinski was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 at the age of 33, well-meaning friends inundated her with products bearing a little pink ribbon. Each product’s maker promised a cut of the sales price to a breast cancer charity, and these friends felt they were supporting the cause and, by association, Zielinski. A petite brunette who’s now 35, she was enormously grateful for the millions of dollars that these pink-ribbon products direct each year to charities that fund breast cancer research and education.

But it wasn’t long before she got a little sick of the pink. “I felt kind of hateful,” says the insurance company sales manager who lives in Charlestown. “I was like, ‘What makes you think I like pink now?’

“I think that the pink ribbon, as a symbol, tends to pretty up what is a pretty crappy disease. But a pink ribbon is easier to look at than the disease itself.”

Many breast cancer survivors like Zielinski find themselves conflicted over this little powerful ribbon. Some survivors feel companies are exploiting breast cancer, marketing themselves as philanthropic outfits that care about women when what they mostly care about is the pink ribbon’s enormous ability to boost profits. Some just feel overwhelmed by the constant pink reminder, especially in October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, of a disease that has forever altered their lives.

Since she was diagnosed 2½ years ago, Anna Schleelein, a 26-year-old attorney in Newton, spends Octobers in a self-imposed pop-culture blackout. She tries to avoid TV, magazines, and, especially, shopping, to steer clear of all those pink-ribbon products. “October is just a reminder of my cancer,” Schleelein says. She is screened for recurrences with MRIs and mammograms every six months, and October is particularly difficult if she is awaiting the results of a test. “I want to buy my English muffins and not be reminded of it while I’m waiting for results to come in.”

“It’s such a double-edged sword,” says LaShaune Johnson, 33, another breast cancer survivor and a postdoctoral fellow, who recently relocated to Hartford from Hyde Park. She did her dissertation on breast cancer organizations and black women. “On the one hand, buying that pink stuff makes you feel connected to the people who survived and made it to the other side.

“But personally,” says Johnson, “I cringe when I see that stuff. I feel like they’re taking advantage of people who are suffering and want a sense of belonging.”

Samantha King’s 2006 book Pink Ribbons Inc. was one of the first that examined why breast cancer, more so than any other illness, became a ubiquitous marketing movement. Answer: The most significant risk factors for breast cancer (such as genetics and age) can’t be altered by women, which is why it’s often regarded as a “blameless” disease. It attacks mostly women, who account for the bulk of America’s purchasing power. It attacks the very symbol of femininity, the breast. And a pink ribbon is cute and soothing. “I’ve talked to survivors who’ve contacted me and were so enraged that their struggle with the disease was being commodified in this way,” says King, who is based in Kingston, Ontario. “The response I’ve heard from corporations when I challenge them about this is ‘Who cares, as long as the money is going to a good cause?’

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By Chris Walters

Consumerist | The next time you apply for a credit card, your credit report and income will be only a part of the criteria used to determine your creditworthiness. For that matter, as long as you have the card, what you use it for will be noted and added to a growing set of data that makes up your psychological profile, which will then be referred to every time the bank deals with your or reevaluates your risk as a customer.

The New York Times Magazine takes a look at this new method of determining credit risk, pioneered by Canadian Tire executive J.P. Martin about 6 years ago.

Martin's measurements were so precise that he could tell you the "riskiest" drinking establishment in Canada - Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the "safest" products - premium birdseed and a device called a "snow roof rake" that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don't fall on pedestrians.

It's not just that what you buy reflects your socioeconomic level and current financial status, however; what Martin did was take the raw data and tease out personality traits that explained the the purchases while predicting future behavior.

Why did birdseed and snow-rake buyers pay off their debts? The answer, research indicated, was that those consumers felt a sense of responsibility toward the world, manifested in their spending on birds they didn't own and pedestrians they might not know. Why were felt-pad buyers so upstanding? Because they wanted to protect their belongings, be they hardwood floors or credit scores. Why did chrome-skull owners skip out on their debts? "The person who buys a skull for their car, they are like people who go to a bar named Sharx," Martin told me. "Would you give them a loan?"

Lenders have been using this sort of data mining ever since, but until recently they've kept it on the down-low to avoid triggering any privacy fears from customers. Now, with billions of dollars of losses from formerly profitable customers (i.e. the slightly risker ones) who suddenly can't pay, the lenders are using their psychological data not only to screen for the "right" sorts of customers but also to try to convince the bad ones to pay off their debts.

There's another reason for this, too: it helps build a stronger relationship with the customer.

If a credit-card company detects unsettling patterns, it might start cutting credit lines, raising interest rates or accelerating repayment schedules. (Companies are expected to withdraw $2.7 trillion of credit by the end of 2010, according to a March report from the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, a banking-analyst firm.) But the most useful information the card companies are deriving from their data are the insights that help them deepen their relationships with customers, particularly when a cardholder is going through a rough time. One of the strongest conclusions of the psychological studies is that cardholders are most likely to pay the bills of those companies with which they have an emotional connection.

By Laura Clark

Daily Mail UK | Schools using ‘Orwellian language’ are turning teenagers into ‘customers’ rather than students, a landmark report says today.

Phrases such as ‘performance indicators’ and ‘curriculum delivery’ are interfering with the enthusiasm teachers have for doing their jobs, the six-year investigation finds.

The Oxford-based Nuffield Review, the most comprehensive study of secondary education in 50 years, said that ‘the words we use shape our thinking’.

And the report said that ‘the Orwellian language (seeping through government documents) of “performance management and control” has come to dominate educational deliberation and planning’.

Teachers are inundated with the language of measurable ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, ‘performance indicators’ and ‘audits’, ‘targets’ and ‘curriculum delivery’, ‘customers’ and ‘deliverers’, ‘efficiency gains’ and ‘bottom lines’, it said.

In a damning indictment, the report said that a culture of hitting targets, where ‘cuts in resources are euphemistically called “efficiency gains”‘, has led to ‘the consumer or client’ replacing ‘the learner’.

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