• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, February 2, 2007

It's National Wear Red Day, and all that color should be enough to get most marketers salivating over potential product tie-ins.

After all, thousands of products potentially prevent heart disease, the leading killer of women in the U.S., according to the American Heart Association, which launched Go Red For Women in 2004.

It turns out that selling women on heart health isn't as easy as one might think. Part of the issue is awareness: The Mayo Clinic says that only 13% of American women know that heart disease is their No. 1 health risk.

But part of it is that women are emotionally attached to the idea of curing breast cancer, which claimed the lives of 41,000 women in the U.S. last year, compared to 460,000 women who died from heart-related illness.

Breast cancer continues to be both a fund-raising and marketing juggernaut. In the 25 years since its launch, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, for example, has raised more than $1 billion for research and community outreach.

Breast cancer awareness campaigns have been so successful because fund-raisers "made it be about sisterhood, not just disease awareness, and that was so appealing," said Kristian Darigan, vice president-cause branding at Cone Communications in Boston. She worked with AHA to create Go Red.

And as a cause, heart disease has big challenges. "For a long time, heart disease was seen as an old white man's disease," said Darigan, despite the vast numbers of women and minorities who are affected. And it also is a harder sell because heart-health awareness asks a lot of women: "It helps if you quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more, eat better, know your risk factors, and sometimes, take medication," she said. That's more work than scheduling an annual mammogram.

So far, while there are literally thousands of products linked to "Think pink" marketing efforts, only a relatively small number of marketers have hitched their wagons to the "Go Red" campaign. Macy's, which will give a 15% discount to any shoppers wearing red today, sponsors the campaign nationally. Other corporate partners include Kellogg's Smart Start, Campbell Soup Co.'s Healthy Request, and Hamilton Beach Co.

But Darigan said that's changing. "So many products are marketed as 'heart-healthy' now, and that's all part of this growing awareness. In the 1980s, it was all about AIDS, and in the '90s, it was breast cancer," she said. "But heart health is unique, ownable, and relevant," she said. "It's going to be the cause of this decade."