We Care

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

We care a lot about the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines
We care a lot about the N.Y., S.F. and L.A.P.D.
We care a lot about you people! We care a lot about your guns!
We care a lot about the wars you're fighting, gee! That looks like fun!

—Faith No More, "We Care a Lot"

Money, Incorporated is catching a lot of flak for bad environmental practices, price-fixing, mistreatment of employees, and all kinds of Corrupt Corporate Executive-ness. So what do they do? Make a Public Relations Ad showing how much good they do, and just how much they really care about the Earth/Little Guy/Mom and Apple Pie/what have you. We really do, honest!

In reality, however, this company does not care. It never cares. This company is dead set against caring. The CEO doesn't allow the corporation to take an action that decreases projected profits, for any reason. Period. If it looks like it's bending that rule, you can bet there are a bevy of charts and graphs showing how the PR will pay for the losses.

When the theme is "We care about the environment", this is commonly termed greenwashing. There's also "pinkwashing", in which everything from breast cancer funding to gay pride parades are hijacked as demographic marketing tools to reach specific groups of consumers (such as women, or the LGBT community).

When the entire company acts like this to everyone, that's Peace and Love Incorporated.

Compare Photo Op with the Dog. Not related to We Really Do Care.

Examples of We Care include:

Advertising

  • The You Don't Know Jack commercial parody. It's also on the "The Ride" version of "You Don't Hear Jack"

Film

  • Monsters, Inc.. "We scare because we care."
    • Unlike in most cases of this trope, they actually do care. The problem is that they care too much
  • In Tommy Boy, Ray Zalinsky's big honkin' auto parts ads always end in how much he cares about families. So much so that even Tommy is impressed, despite the fact that Zalinsky's attempting to buy out Tommy's hometown auto parts company just for the name, which would put hundreds (including Tommy) out of work in the process.
  • In the Steven Seagal movie On Deadly Ground, the Big Bad's company, Aegis Oil, is filming a We Care commercial with caribou and seals covered in oil and basically milking it for all it's worth. But the instant the director says "cut," the first words out of the Big Bad's mouth are "Fuck! These animals stink!" and he's yelling at his men to get the animals out of there.
  • In Michael Clayton, fictional company United North Cared a Lot.
  • In the movie Pump Up the Volume, Hubert Humphrey High School's principal started hanging up posters promoting a student outreach program called BIONIC (Believe It Or Not I Care), encouraging troubled teens to call a phone number on the posters. The posters were nothing but a trap to catch pirate radio broadcaster Christian Slater with a wire-tapped phone.

Literature

  • Spoofed in the Discworld novel Going Postal: "They had even instated an 'Employee of the Month' program to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care."
  • Pink Ribbons, Inc. (book and film) attack the use or misuse of breast cancer charities as advertisements to plug cosmetics and other products targeted at women.

Live Action TV

Music Videos

  • The plastic surgeon in the music video for TLC's "Unpretty" has this as their slogan. Needless to say, that particular facility cares more about its bottom line than its patients. For example, a girl is shown having (perhaps botched) breast implants ripped out of her while she is still awake, causing the Pinball Protagonist to rethink her plans to get breast implants.

Newspaper Comics

Video Games

  • Spoofed in Grand Theft Auto III: pay attention to the radio, and you'll see a Nike Eris Running Shoes ad claiming that nope, their factories ain't sweatshops, no sir, hell no. Then you hear some kids saying "It's cool! We get to play with knives!", "My friend stitched his hands together the other day!", and "Yesterday, I made a dollar!".
  • "Spirited debate. It's the cornerstone of our philosophy here at the Hanso Foundation..." One of many from The Lost Experience. Players of the game of course know how evil these guys are.
  • The UAC from Doom 3.

Web Original

  • Skewered in The Onion article entitled GE Ad Trumpets Company's Government-Ordered Environmental Cleanup
    • After the BP oil spill in 2011, this became reality: ads reminding viewers that they were working to clean up the spill were all over television. What's worse was that an investigation uncovered that the plans they had written out in case of such a disaster heavily prioritized PR over actually cleaning up the spill.
  • In the wake of BP's oil spill catastrophe, a fake Twitter account popped up, signing off most of its tweets with #bpcares. For instance: "We've created something that will affect your children's children. Can YOU say the same about YOUR life? #nailedit #bpcares"
  • This was an explicit part of Verizon's plan for Tumblr after its kindergartenization in December 2018. They publicly announced that they planned to piggyback onto and monetize social movements with memberships on the site, like Black Lives Matter, in order to generate more revenue than Tumblr was already producing This turned out to be pathetic self-delusion: all they accomplished was driving away the very userbase they'd intended on exploiting.

Western Animation

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