Yellow

What started as a simple creative charitable idea by the famous U.S. cyclist and record-setting Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, has not only raised millions of dollars and heightened awareness with its inspiring message, but the legendary yellow wristbands have become the must-have accessory.

The yellow band that started out as a simple fund raising tool has taken on a life of its own. This seems to be the ultimate example of how a well-known athlete used his name power and his public battle with cancer to create one of the most powerful foundations and charitable campaigns ever. What’s most inspiring about Lance Armstrong’s story is not just his battle with cancer, but his subsequent determination and inhuman-like dedication to overcome that battle and turn it into unprecedented athletic success.

As a tribute to Armstrong's fight against cancer, the Lance Armstrong Foundation began selling yellow wristbands engraved with his mantra, "Live Strong" in an effort to raise $5 million to help people living with cancer. The fundraising effort began in May 2004 and far surpassed the original goal, having sold “over 25 million wristbands” that year. The Foundation partnered with Nike and sold over 100 million over the course of the last 5 years, but the band has become “as much a fashion statement or status symbol as it is an icon of the Lance Armstrong Foundation's fundraising program”.

The promotion was so successful that the Foundation partnered with Nike stores across the country to sell the bands to help satisfy the overwhelming consumer demand rather than exclusively selling them on the foundation's web site. Eventually, we all started seeing those yellow bands on various websites, including e-Bay, selling the LiveSTRONG wristbands at inflated prices. Perhaps, at that time, the campaign lost sight of its initial goals of just supporting the age-old fight against cancer, and became bigger than just a nice token to support a charitable cause. I guess there was not much the foundation could do about that and they were not benefiting from the profits these third-party companies/websites were collecting from the resale, but they certainly became way more of a fashion statement and a trend than a symbol of social responsibility.

One of the reasons the yellow wristband program was unique and so successful was that the donation was only one dollar. But for a small donation, the wearer was able to identify himself with a world-class athlete who has reached global celebrity status.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation's Livestrong fundraising program started a mass production of copycat products. How many of us are guilty of wearing some sort of colored wristband at some point in the past 5 years? We all took part is this crazy trend in one way or another. If you did not buy a wristband of some sort for your favorite sports team or to support a random event or a cause you did not even know you were supporting but you liked the color of the wristband, you are probably part of the minority! It is a sad, but very telling truth. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to the success of a new fashion trend but, in this case, it drove the success of a very serious and powerful campaign. One will never know if Lance Armstrong’s amazing success in the Tour de France translated into supporters and fans wanting the wristbands or if the wristbands just became such a hot item that they really had nothing to do with that name-power of the athlete or the business sense of the foundations’ founders. At the end of the day, however, the campaign was extremely successful; everyone knows that. You don’t need to research the numbers or study the top celebrity foundations to know that Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation is probably at the way top of the charts. This is one successful story that may never be matched in terms of its undisputed success!

Posted by Stephanie Cantor