October is breast cancer awareness month and many companies use this opportunity to contribute to the cause and to educate their customers about breast cancer prevention.

Some companies also try to cash in, and generously put, they seek to do well by doing good. They place pink ribbons on their products and in their ads to give well-meaning consumers an added incentive to buy their products. This is called “cause marketing.”

Those who track these promotions say that consumers should “Think Before You Pink“.

*MOUSE PRINT: Don’t assume that the mere purchase of the product will result in a substantial contribution to breast cancer causes, or any contribution at all. You have to read the details.

Eureka once put a sticker on their LiteSpeed vacuums proclaiming that they “will make a contribution to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation with every LiteSpeed sold.*”   According to Breast Cancer Action, their actual donation was only $1 per vacuum, and those models could sell for upwards of $200.

Sun Chips snacks sport the pink ribbon, but require you to visit their website and enter a special code from the package in order to trigger the company’s donation. Many people might just see the breast cancer information on the package and assume that a donation is triggered by the mere purchase of the item.

Viva towels requires you to redeem a particular coupon for an additional donation to be made.

Campbell’s has put the pink ribbon on two of their soups in Kroger stores, and the cans are flying off the shelf, doubling in sales. The donation: about 3.5 cents per can. (All told, on sales of seven million cans, Campbell’s will donate $250,000.)  Certainly that is a substantial sum, but still only a few pennies per can.

Mouse Print* is not suggesting that you shouldn’t buy these products, nor that companies should stop making such contributions. Rather, just be aware that less than you think may actually be going to the cause, and you may have to do more than just buy the product to trigger the contribution.

For more information, read this Wall Street Journal article . And to help you “think before you pink”, here are some questions to ask before you buy.

With that flame logo and energy-sounding name, one might think that Enviga was the new moniker for an old gas company. In fact, Enviga is a new green tea and caffeine beverage from the Coca Cola Company that claims to “help burn calories by gently increasing your metabolism.”

Their website says that since “each can of Enviga contains only 5 calories, you end up burning more calories than you consume – so for the first time you can actually ‘drink negative.'”

That claim is reminiscent of the old joke about a man boasting that his car was so fuel efficient that he actually had to stop every few miles to dump out excess gasoline.

The website also says that according to their own study, [Coke has just removed the abstract of their unpublished study from the Enviga website]  the average person burned 106 extra calories drinking three cans of Enviga a day.

*MOUSE PRINT:  The study was very small, consisting of only 32 healthy people, of normal weight, aged 18 – 35. (Wouldn’t this product appeal more to overweight people, and where is the study for that?) The results actually showed that there was no difference in fat oxidation (fat burning) between those drinking Enviga versus a placebo. But it did show that “energy expenditure” was significantly higher for the Enviga drinkers.

Coke is very careful in the way they word their claims, never saying anything about weight loss. Instead they say this drink “is a simple way and positive step you can take toward a healthy balanced lifestyle.”  The back of the can even cautions that drinking more than three cans a day of Enviga will not have any additional effect.

A company representative who was interviewed on the Today Show (watch video) danced around the answer to Matt’s question — if this is not a weight loss product, how does invigorating one’s metabolism lead to better health?

The real problem with a product subtitled “the calorie burner” is the reasonable inference that consumers will draw from such a claim — that you can drink this product and lose weight, and the more you drink, the more weight you will lose.

There is no doubt that Enviga will be subject of many articles and debates, [see Wall Street Journal piece], as it is rolled out in select cities next month, and nationwide in January (at $1.29 a can).