Commercializing the ‘Commodity’

The fair trade coffee movement is a large and modern area of discussion. Drinking coffee in the morning is a natural part of many North American’s morning routines. Thus, making this social movement more prevalent to a larger part of today’s society. There are many techniques employed in the commercialization of coffee to target consumers. Companies are getting creative when it comes to marketing, because there is no way to tell for certain that ‘fair-trade coffee’ tastes better than its competitors. Marketing teams have to think about other ways of getting consumers to buy their fair-trade brand, ways that will grab attention of consumers. Coffee companies are now playing on the morality of consumers as social beings. For example, the Cooperative Coffees website states: “fair trade lets consumers be part of a social justice movement through a simple action.”(Cooperative Coffees 2006) By marketing to people that choosing fair-trade labeled coffee they are taking part in the social movement, and helping bring awareness to other companies, that are not yet fair-trade certified brands. The message being that if you want consumers you need to be involved in the fair-trade production of your coffee beans. Coffee producers/suppliers rely on consumption by consumers; so fair-trade movements aim themselves at the consumers to ‘make the right choice’ by choosing to purchase fair trade coffee.De Pelsmacker and his colleagues said, “Fair-trade buying is a specific type of ethical consumer behavior.” (De Pelsmacker…et. al 2005: 367)

Green Mountain Coffee provides another example of commercialization. At a promotional fair-trade coffee event for the company they gave out T-shirts that read: “Clean up your conscience! Drink Fair Trade Coffee.” The T-shirts also provided a set of “Conscience Cleaning Instructions: Step one, buy fair trade coffee; step two, drink and enjoy the taste of a better world; step three, repeat, early and often.” (Cooperative Coffees 2006)  “The claim being made here is that the more diligently we consume this product, the more moral people we will be—“(Fisher 2007:81-82)

Green Mountain Coffee

Green Mountain Coffee also has a video on their webpage (www.greenmountaincoffee.com) called ‘The Heart of the Cup’ that gives a brief look at how their coffee is produced from the tree to the cup. This video can also been seen  below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM2PyBpWjN0

With the fast growing awareness in the past decade, or so, about the benefits of fair trade products to both the consumer and producers has also come a wave of protest by student groups on campuses who are attempting “to persuade fellow students and campus food services to purchase fair-trade products [.]” (Fisher 2007: 83) This all leads to one question: Do you buy fair-trade coffee because you believe in the cause, or because you want to be seen to believe in the cause?