During the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry became among the most vilified sectors in the global economy. Rather than being associated with the development of essential medicines that save or extend human lives, it became the object of attack from disease advocacy movements that claimed the industry favored profits over access to treatment. What's more, some of these movements proved quite successful in promoting greater access, most notably in the case of HIV/AIDS.

The effectiveness of disease advocacy movements is surprising in some respects. After all, leading students of corporate social responsibility believed that the pharmaceutical industry presented a “hard case” for social advocates, given its monopoly power over certain drug classes and the inability of consumers to find substitutes (see Baron 2005). It was much easier, they believed, to rally consumers to an anti-corporate cause when the costs of switching to other products were low. What a product-level analysis overlooks, however, is the points of vulnerability that might exist within an industry's structure, making it amenable to advocacy pressure.