Pink October? Blame ‘cause marketing’

updated 11:14 a.m. ET Oct. 15, 2007

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. - October used to be shrouded in black and orange, but in recent years, pink has nudged into the palette.

It seems just about every product you can buy — from Indianapolis Colts mini-helmets to M&M candies, from Avaya phone faceplates to Yoplait yogurt — is available in pink, or at least pink packaging, as part of a promotion to raise awareness and money for breast cancer research.

The companies say the “cause marketing” campaigns do good for the world — and they’re not bad for sales, either.

It may sound like an idea that’s hard to argue with, but all the pink has some people seeing red.

“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 in 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.”

The group’s executive director, Barbara Brenner, a breast cancer survivor who never wears a pink ribbon herself, says that in many cases corporate images get what she calls a “pinkwash” while the cause gets nominal donations.

“Awareness, we don’t need any more of,” she said. “We have plenty of awareness. The question is what we do now.”

The pink sales campaigns are probably the biggest and best-known efforts in the world of “cause marketing,” where companies team up with charities with the aim of bringing in more money for both.

Apple sells red iPods as part of the big (PRODUCT) RED effort of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and Build-A-Bear Workshop sells a stuffed giraffe whose proceeds support the World Wildlife Federation. Then, there’s 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 Co. 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 Rye, N.Y., company that puts on workshops about cause marketing.

In 1982, the Dallas-based foundation now known as Susan G. Komen for the Cure began trying to get attention for breast cancer, a deadly and common disease that wasn’t 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.

Now, those campaigns are a juggernaut.

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