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"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"

Evil, Inc. is catching a lot of flak for bad environmental practices, price-fixing, mistreatment of employees, and all kinds of Predatory Businesses. 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. When it's "We care about LGBT people/rights" or "We care about breast cancer awareness", it's commonly called pinkwashing.

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

Compare Photo Op with the Dog. Could be considered a variant of We Don't Suck Anymore, but that trope is related to quality, not ethics (and is sometimes true). Supertrope of Greenwashed Villainy. Not related to We Really Do Care.


Examples:

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

    Alternate Reality Games 
  • "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 know how evil these guys are.

    Comic Books 
  • Used in at least one The Simpsons comic with "Globex Corporation - We Dominate Because We Care".

    Films — Animation 
  • Monsters, Inc.. "We scare because we care." Unlike in most cases of this trope, they actually do care. The problem is that some of the higher-ups care too much.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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.
    Zalinsky: I make car parts for the American working man, because that's what I am, and that's who I care about. Truth is, I make car parts for the American working man because I'm a hell of a salesman and he doesn't know any better.
  • In On Deadly Ground, the Big Bad is introduced filming a commercial of this kind for his company Aegis Oil, 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.
  • In Mr. Mom, Caroline, working for an advertising firm, convinces the head of a tuna company struggling due to a recession to make one of these ads, and to back it up by lowering the price of their tuna to make it easier for struggling consumers to put food on the table.
    Humphries: When this crisis is over, we will go back to our regular prices. Until then, remember, we're all in this together. Schooner Tuna. The tuna with a heart.

    Literature 
  • The Alex Rider novel Crocodile Tears focuses around a charity organization named First Aid, renowned worldwide for their generosity and prompt response to disasters. In fact, many of these disasters (like the chemical explosion in Chennai at the beginning and the planned chemical attack on Kenya) are actually staged by Desmond McCain, First Aid's founder, for the express purpose of amassing as much money and respect as he can via donations to his charity.
  • 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."

    Live-Action TV 
  • Old Saturday Night Live commercial parodynote : "We don't care. We don't have to care. We're the phone company."note 
  • The same bit in The President's Analyst from 1967, where TPC (which literally stood for "The Phone Company") controlled virtually everything, and didn't care who knew it.
  • In a 30 Rock episode, a character played by Steve Martin invented a fake company called SunStream. The ads covered up the fact that they didn't actually do anything by simply showing the words "innovation", "tomorrow" and "America" flash across the screen accompanied by inspirational images and music.
  • In the first season of Better Off Ted, each episode had a fake We Care commercial for the evil corporation that is the setting for the show.
  • One of Craig Ferguson's more common gags is to mock the "CBS note  Cares" ads.
  • On The Colbert Report Stephen showed this commercial from his sponsor Prescott Oil.
  • How I Met Your Mother:
    • The plot of one episode involved a commercial of this kind for the Goliath National Bank, the employer of Barney and Marshall. The latter at first refused to appear in the ad, because of the GNB's evil MegaCorp status, but eventually changed his mind after he made one employee very happy by firing him.
    • One aside from Ted described the company that Barney worked for as "the makers of the yellow fuzz on tennis balls" noting that their commercials focused on that product rather than the montage of chemical refineries and what suspisioucly resembled North Korean military weaponry.
  • A large part of Sharon's job in Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place was coming up with ways to spin the various ecological disasters created by the chemical company she worked for.
  • On The Boys (2019), Vought International, the MegaCorp that runs the Seven and most other superheroes, is shown to be an extremely image-focused organization, all for the goal of winning public support for the idea of Military Superheroes.
    • In the episode "The Innocents", the Seven are shown making a video titled "Super in America" in order to humanize their images, though it's suggested this is the wrong PR approach for Vought's mission of getting their supes into the military. It doesn't help that Starlight has just publicly revealed that she was sexually assaulted by The Deep, one of her teammates within the Seven — and that Vought proceeded to spin this into an attempt to market Starlight as a feminist superhero. A particularly brutal note is that The Deep is shown supporting a movement to clean up beaches of trash — and it becomes clear that, in fact, all the trash on the beach is planted, and whenever he does another take, they put the trash back before the camera starts rolling again.
    • Vought is at it again in season two, this time going all-in on pretending to be feminist when they recruit Stormfront onto the team and market her with Starlight and Queen Maeve under the slogan "Girls Get it Done" — while covering up the fact that Stormfront is a violent, virulent racist and a literal old-school Nazi. Homelander outing Queen Maeve as bisexual and dating a woman also causes Vought to latch onto LGBT+ rights in order to market Maeve as a symbol of queer pride, notwithstanding Maeve's actual thoughts on the matter (to start, she was Forced Out of the Closet as a power move against her on Homelander's part, and kept her sexuality and relationship with Elena secret because she feared what Homelander might do to Elena if he found out).
    • Season two also brings us the Church of the Collective, whose charity work is more interested in evangelism than in actually helping the poor. At one event, The Deep hands out copies of their Dianetics-like holy text at a homeless shelter and comes off looking like a callous jerk.
    Homeless woman: They said there'd be food.
    The Deep: Well, this is food for your soul.

    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.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Parodied in Dinosaurs with the "We Say So" corporation.

    Video Games 
  • Spoofed in Grand Theft Auto III: pay attention to the radio, and you'll hear an Eris Running Shoes ad claiming that nope, their factories ain't sweatshops, no sir, hell no. Then you hear some kids saying "It's fun! We get to play with knives!", "My friend Joey sewed his hands together!", and "Yesterday, I made a dollar!".
  • WildStar has Protostar. Protostar: Making dreams come true. For money! (Protostar is not responsible for making dreams come true)
  • The bioweapon manufacturing Umbrella Corporation of Resident Evil cultivated a benign public image, with mottoes like "Our business is life itself" and "Preserving the health of the people".note  Wesker even makes a snarky comment in The Umbrella Chronicles about how Umbrella loved its perky facade.
  • Spider-Man: Miles Morales: Roxxon's ads have their corporate slogan "here for you". They aren't, even when they're not knocking down buildings in Harlem to put up their office buildings. They're barely there for each other.

    Webcomics 
  • In Our Little Adventure, Brian Souballo magically disguised himself as an old teacher he failed to recruit to his side, and used the disguise to frame the teacher for destruction and murder at the city of Silverfronds. Right after this mission, Brian ordered his imperial toadies to assist in the cleanup of the damage caused, intending on getting good publicity for his empire.

    Web Original 
  • Skewered in The Onion article entitled ''GE Ad Trumpets Company's Government-Ordered Environmental Cleanup''
  • After the BP oil spill, 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 video from H. Bomberguy about "woke brands" goes into detail on this phenomenon, specifically the modern (late 2010s) incarnation of brands attaching themselves to progressive social causes in order to market their products. He feels that, while such branding does have positive value in driving conversation and pushing back against reactionary viewpoints, it also has two ulterior motives: to reorient the brands in question to be more acceptable in a changing social climate, and to whitewash the often exploitative and problematic practices that the companies might engage in behind the scenes, from Third World labor practices to the "pink tax" on female-branded products that are functionally identical to their male equivalents yet still more expensive.

    Western Animation 
  • In Futurama, Mom's Friendly Robot Company is headed by Mom, whose public image is that of a friendly mother. In actuality Mom is an unscrupulous business woman, and all around unpleasant.
  • In Batman: The Animated Series Goth Corp's Slogan was "The People Company". The CEO Ferris Boyle (Voiced by Mark Hamill) tried to expel Mr Freeze's wife after he found out that Freeze was using company equipment to cure her fatal disease, an act which killed her and caused Freeze's condition.
    Boyle: Look, Bruce, that "people company" bit is good press, but when the wage slaves start acting like they own the joint it's time to pull the plug.
  • Played with Hank Scorpio in The Simpsons. His compassionate nature and the new job he hired Homer for seem too good to be true. He genuinely is a Benevolent Boss who truly does care for his employees. He just also happens to be a Bond Villain trying to take over the world.
  • South Park: A Running Gag in the "Coon Trilogy" is that BP commits various atrocities on nature through their oil drilling, to the point that they awaken Cthulhu. To address these concerns, CEO Tony Haywood makes apology videos set to calm music with visuals of him petting a seal, baking cookies, sitting in a field of dandelions, lying sexily on a rug by the fireplace, etc. Despite this, BP doesn't do anything better and just doubles down on their irresponsible drilling practices.

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