Not everyone is pleased by the pink campaign

MOUNT LAUREL, NEW JERSEY: It seems just about every product one can buy in the United States —_ from M&M candies to Yoplait yogurt —_ is available in pink, or at least pink packaging, to raise awareness and money for breast cancer research. The pink sales campaigns are probably the world’s biggest and best-known efforts in “cause marketing”, where companies team up with charities with the aim of bringing in more money for both. But all the pink has some people seeing red with anger.

‘Pink Ribbons, Inc’, a book published last year by Samantha King, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, found fault with the way corporate sponsorship has put the emphasis on finding a cure rather than figuring out why the cancer rate is so high.

And for five years now, the San Francisco-based group Breast Cancer Action, which bills itself as the “bad girls of breast cancer”, has been running an anti-pink product campaign called ‘Think Before You Pink’.

“Awareness, we don’t need any more of,” said the group’s executive director, Barbara Brenner, a breast cancer survivor. “We have plenty of awareness. The question is what we do now.” In another example of cause marketing, Apple sells red iPods as part of the big (PRODUCT) RED effort of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Build-A-Bear Workshop. sells a stuffed giraffe whose proceeds support the World Wildlife Federation. Then there is Newman’s Own, the food company that gives its profits to various causes. The first blockbuster cause marketing campaign came in 1983, when American Express announced it would contribute money to restoring Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty based on how much its customers charged. Applications for the card spiked, card use peaked, and $1.7 million was raised.

And corporate America had a new sales pitch. “It focused a lot of attention that you could motivate consumers by appealing to the best in them,” said David Hessekiel, president of Cause Marketing Forum, a company that puts on workshops about cause marketing. In 1982, the foundation now known as Susan G Komen for the Cure began trying to get attention for breast cancer, a deadly and common disease that was not much talked about.

It started getting attention with its Race for the Cure. Some of the sponsors of the walk/run started marketing campaigns around the cause. In the last fiscal year, which ended March 31, Komen says it brought in more than $58 million from corporate sponsors. Much of that money came from sellers of pink products, though some was also from Race for the Cure national sponsorships.

Nearly 140 companies are currently running promotions to support Komen; additional companies are using pink and contributing to other breast-cancer causes. In the past 25 years, Komen has invested nearly $1 billion in breast cancer research, education and support. The interest it has raised is one reason US government spending on the disease has grown in that time from $30 million per year to about $900 million per year. Cause Marketing Forum’s Hessekiel sees breast cancer as a natural for cause marketing because it reaches women, who do much of the United States’ shopping, and because pink is a handy symbol.