MMMmmmMMM, chocolate. And in a good cause, to boot.

So I received an email from a friend last night; or perhaps I should say, I received a successfully propogated viral marketing email from a friend, on behalf of the makers of M&Ms and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, explaining the new product containing pink and white M&Ms, and how 50 cents from the sale of each bag will be donated to the Komen Foundation, so you should go out and buy a lot of these special pink and white M&Ms.

OOooh, looky! There's the small print: They'll contribute 50 cents per bag sold, up to a maximum donation of $650,000. That is, they'll contribute, but only for the first 1.3 million bags they sell.

Don't get me wrong: over half a million bucks is certainly more than I'm likely to donate to charity this year, even if you combine all my charitable contributions. And 1.3 million bags of M&Ms is likely more than I could eat during the three months this promotion will be going on.

And this is a legit promotion; no doubt about that. But what's the catch? Just this: they'll donate 50 cents per unit sold, up to a sales level of 1.3 million bags. So, presumably, they're raising the wholesale price by some amount - possibly 50 cents per unit, possibly 33 cents, to allow a 50 % markup and thus a 50 cent retail increase. (Or they're keeping the price the same, and reducing the size of the package; perhaps from 10 or 12 ounces to 8 ounces, to the same effect. And, of course, just possibly they're keeping the wholesale price and the package size the same, and it's completely a corporate contribution.) Anything they sell over 1.3 million, they keep the extra proceeds. Just how many units are they going to make, and how many are they expecting to sell? I don't know, of course, but my feeling is that selling only 1.3 million units - nationwide - in a 3-month period - with a big advertising push, and a lot of free P.R. and viral marketing (e.g., this email) - even plus-or-minus 100,000 - would actually constitute a marketing failure, and if this were a regular product with those results, they'd pull it from the market and never sell it again. With no hard data to back up my guess, I'd have thought they'd sell 1.3 million units in either New York or California alone.

True, the Susan G Komen Foundation gets free publicity from this promotion, and each unit sold might lead to someone asking for more information or making a separate, additional contribution. And certainly the pink-and-white combination of M&Ms can be a conversation-starter, the way that the Lance Armstrong yellow bracelets are. But that should be counterbalanced by the fact that anyone who buys a bag beyond the first 1.3 million sold will be misled into believing that her purchase is actually contributing to the Foundation, and thus she doesn't need to contribute anything more.

That's what I don't like about "cause-related marketing": when there's an artificial cap on the contribution, the company expects you to buy into the hype and the PR and not realize that they've gotten you to pay more for a product when the excess price is just going into their pockets. In October of the past few years (October being Breast Cancer Awareness month), the SG Komen Foundation has been the recipient of a $100,000 donation "funded" by people clicking on a link on the sponsor's page, each click yielding an additional $1 contribution, up to a $100,000 cap. The year the NFL sponsored it, it was a month-long promotion - but 1.75 million people clicked on the funding link on the first day it was active, so the limit was quickly passed and additional clicking was unnecessary and useless.

I much prefer an open-ended contribution - "for every unit sold - each and every unit - we'll contribute X amount ..." And that's what Nike did with the "Live Strong" yellow bracelets, contributing (to the Lance Armstrong Foundation) something from each individual bracelet sale. (They even took it a couple of steps farther by completely underwriting the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of the bracelets, and by contributing the entire purchase price - not just a portion - to the Foundation.)

My bottom line: Buy M&Ms because you want to, always a good choice. Buy the pink-and-white ones because they stand out, and will be conversation starters. And if you want to ensure that your donation makes it to the Susan G Komen Foundation - another good choice - go to the website and contribute there.