June is here and that means one thing—Pride month! There are rainbow flags in every shop, colourful cocktails out in the bars and a range of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed merchandise available to buy. Of course, this can be incredible as it encourages the celebration of rights of the LGBTQ+ community, but the question is… just how much is rainbow packaging or ‘Pride’ written over certain products going to be helping the Pride community?
Perhaps we should ask how much does it benefit the companies promoting Pride month? A great deal. Many corporations have Pride promotions each year and make money from it, some donate to charity and some don’t do anything at all, they just profit from Pride.
So let’s look at some of the Pride campaigns over the years and see whether it benefited the LGBTQ+ community.
- The infamous LGBT sandwich – Marks and Spencer
Lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato on bread, a take on the popular sandwich ‘BLT’. What does this have to do with Pride? Well, M&S have boxed it in rainbow packaging.
In 2019 M&S received stick for this sandwich, one critic saying:
“Whilst it is good a national company is raising awareness, this is blatant exploitation of a marginalised community for a huge profit.”
M&S do annually donate £10,000 of their profits to AKT, the UK’s national LGBTQ+ youth homelessness charity, but as they make about £1,000 a minute, they have received backlash saying this is not generous enough.
- Colourless skittles
The company Mars have sold ‘colourless’ Skittles for the past few years for Pride month with the slogan ‘only one rainbow matters this pride’.
This received heavy criticism, some people believed this may be promoting ‘white pride’ which is quite the opposite of what the LGBTQ+ community hope to encourage.
Mars did make effort to interact more with the Pride community and even encouraged LGBTQ+ illustrators to create limited edition packaging for Skittles in 2020. They also partnered with GLAAD to donate $1 per pack of colourless Skittles sold (up to $100,000) to the LGBTQ media advocacy group.
Skittles created a #OneRainbow on Twitter too, so you can see they benefited from Pride, but have also made efforts to help the community rather than just see it as a commercial opportunity.
- Pride Listerine
Arguably one of the most ridiculous ones— mouthwash with rainbow packaging around it.
Twitter went crazy when they saw this, one user @FanDabbyJosie said:
“I’m so f*ing tired of companies just chucking a rainbow on their sh*t to sell to us as if it means something
I’ll wash my hair w ogx gay shampoo, eat my gay m&s sandwich and drink my gay absolut vodka wearing my gay primark top before I rinse w gay listerine.”
Listerine didn’t even make any donations to Pride, they just put a rainbow around their mouthwash bottle— like that helps anyone whatsoever.
- H&M Pride range
One of the most awful of all is H&M Pride’s range which is made in Bangladesh, where homosexuality is punishable with life imprisonment. H&M said 10% of the sale price from the H&M’s ‘Love For All’ collection will be donated to the UN’s Free & Equal campaign, but this isn’t directly going to the Pride campaign or helping the countries that suffer the most from illegal homosexuality laws and other devastating situations.
- Pride Absolut Vodka
One company who have supported the LGBTQ+ community for 35 years is Absolut. Since 1981 they have run Pride-based ads in magazines and even covered pride slogans over London buses, encouraging passengers to donate to Stonewall (LGBTQ+ charity).
Absolut have been a huge advocate for Pride and have raised awareness and raised a great amount of money for the cause.
As we’ve seen, many companies profit from promotional occasions such as Pride but won’t actually donate to charities or raise any awareness for the minority group. Placing rainbow packaging over a product and doing nothing else to help the LGBTQ+ community is awful and we should not support these corporations. It is probably more worthwhile to directly donate to the charities.