A major challenge in sustainable business is that many of the good things we want simply can’t be seen. The electronics equipment you are considering may have be made by people being paid a decent wage, or it may not have been. You don’t really know the difference from just looking at the product. Gregory…
Marketing Is An Essential Part Of Positive Change
To change the way commerce works requires good business practice — in all senses of the word good. Marketing is an essential part of positive change. It isn’t good enough to want to do good things for the world with your company, you also need to be a good marketer. To make a positive change…
Change Brands
Chris Baker has a great book, called Obsolete, which focuses on Change Brands. The book discusses how these innovative small brands can help drive towards a more sustainable society. Change Brands The idea of a change brands is similar to a challenger brand but with added purpose. The change brand is a small player attempting…
Should Firms Advertise Their Good Deeds?
How do you get credit for your good deeds? A 2015 paper considers this problem. The authors suggest that informing people of your good deeds can backfire. People attribute impure motives to anyone who draws attention to their good deeds. A similar issue occurs for companies. So, should firms advertise their good deeds? A Moral…
Will Consumers Actually Pay For Sustainability?
There are many ways that sustainable business can be financially successful. One of the first things that comes to mind is that consumers might be willing to pay more for products that are produced in a responsible way. Most consumers would prefer their products not to be made by child labor or to pollute the…
Can Political Advocacy Be Profitable?
You often see people saying things such as ‘can’t they just stick to business?’ You even see claims that business will be more successful if they just cut out the politics. But is this correct? Can political advocacy be profitable? Corporate Political Advocacy And Negativity Bias Corporate Political Advocacy (CPA) is when a firm takes…
Small Differences And Critical Junctures
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson wrote “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” just over a decade ago. It is a great book. Admittedly they don’t really need my opinion given they were given the Nobel Prize for their work, so I doubt that they were sitting around worrying what I thought about…
Does Doing Good Generate Loyalty?
One of the big questions in sustainable business is whether doing good can actually pay. This is often really tricky to establish. In an ideal world, we can run an experiment where we randomly assign some companies to do bad stuff and other identical companies to do good stuff and see what happens. Obviously, we…
What Type Of Green Are You?
Today I’m writing about a blog post. It seems a bit strange to blog about a blog but the classification it presents is very helpful and I’ve found many who don’t know about it. Alex Steffen’s classifications of people’s attitudes to environmental sustainability seeks to explain divides within the green community. So, what type of…
A Challenge With Managerial Articles
I’m a big fan of accessible research. People, rightly, get put off by a piece of work where the footnotes are longer than the main text. It is horrible to have your ability to concentrate on the ‘story’ that the researcher is trying to convey being constantly interrupted by intrusive footnotes. (The worst is when…
