One of the complaints greens have about cause marketing is that it typically incentivizes and rewards the purchase of more stuff. Stuff that might be useful for a while but eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere. Into this conundrum came Sprint , the mobile service provider, and Samsung , the handset maker. Together they came up with a cause marketing campaign that mitigates some of those usual concerns. From August to Dec 2009, Sprint gave $2 to the Nature Conservancy for the sale of each Samsung Reclaim phone and messaging device. There was a guaranteed minimum donation of $250,000. A press release tells me that the maximum donation was $500,000, which the program achieved. The Reclaim phone currently sells for $49.99, with a Sprint plan. The Nature Conservancy is using the donation for its ‘ Adopt an Acre ’ program. To mitigate green concerns, the phone was made from 80 percent recyclable materials and its packaging was fully recyclable. It was the first phone sold in the U.S. w
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