In a recent trend watching blogpost, the author details how with the free flow of information to consumers today, many things that allowed us to live in blissful ignorance in the western world are coming to light.  Things like child labour, terrible wages for outsourced jobs, horrible working conditions in developing countries, and even in some cases physical abuse have all been revealed to hide somewhere in the supply chains of the world’s biggest and previously most trustworthy brands.  Consumers these days in the western world can’t consume anything without feeling slightly guilty about where it came from.

This, as the article outlines, is the basis for a new and incredibly powerful form of marketing that they label as GFC, or in other words, “Guilt-free consumption”.  Companies now seem to be competing less and less about the actual product they’re selling and more about how little blood was spilled in its creation.  The more green, the less outsourcing of jobs to the developing world, the better the company and therefore the less guilt a consumer is burdened to carry. In the article they use the example of Tesla with their electric cars to illustrate how consumers are influenced by GFC, however I’ll reference to an early blog post I did on Chipotle.  Chipotle came out with an incredibly powerful advertisement that attempted to highlight the problems with the current food industry, a hot topic on the guilty consumer’s conscience. By painting themselves as away from all the corruption and inhumane ways of bringing food to the table they also distance themselves from the guilt factor that consumers are now used  to bearing.  An emotional release from this kind of burden is incredibly powerful and it’s clear that more and more companies are starting to realize the benefit of GFC.

assuming the glitter came from Bangladesh