Targeting the Sponsors of the 2008 Olympic Games

Following up on a recent post about the PlayFair 2008 campaign denouncing the violation of core labor standards in China, I would like to point out an article that just came out in Business Week (BW). It explains how the multinational corporations–General Electric, Kodak, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Visa, etc.–that are sponsoring the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are being increasingly targeted by activists. According to BW, the sponsors are caught between a rock and a hard place:

“If companies ignore activists such as Darfur groups—who have already branded next summer’s games the Genocide Olympics, in reference to what they say is China’s complicity with mass killings in Sudan—they risk angering consumers back home. But if they criticize Beijing, they could run afoul of the Chinese government and jeopardize their future in the world’s most promising market.”

Companies respond with some spin, trying to please everyone:

What I find really interesting in these developments is that civil society organizations no longer target exclusively governments and international institutions but also private actors such as multinational corporations. Replicating the anti-sweatshop campaigns of the 1990s, they attempt to undermine the reputation of brands in consumer markets. Insofar as in advanced industrial economies corporations increasingly concentrate their activities on product definition, design, and marketing–while offshoring manufacturing–brand reputation has become one of their major weak points. Hence the apparent effectiveness of this brand-targeting strategy.