Category: Sustainability
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Limits And Self-Limits
Giorgos Kallis, a proponent of Degrowth has a paper on limits. He links this to the work of Malthus (see here). Indeed, to my mind, one way to see Kallis’ work is an attempt to distance ecologists from Malthus. I don’t blame him for that aim. Kallis also investigates the nature of limits. He rejects…
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Effective And Strategic Altruism
A few years ago William MacAskill was all the rage. His effective altruism movement was riding high. Many of the rich and powerful endorsed his views. Things have gone off the boil a bit since. So, with an eye for being behind the trend today I’ll look his Doing Good Better ideas. I’ll also set…
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Win-Wins Are Good For Stakeholders
A theme I see in some writing about sustainable business is that we need to get beyond win-wins. Although I get the point — business cases won’t deliver everything — I worry that this isn’t the right message. Win-wins are good for stakeholders, and we haven’t found all the win-wins yet. As such, I’m not…
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Mapping Corporate Sustainability Research
How has marketing strategy research focused on sustainability changed over time? This is an important question for researchers that also matters for those who use academic research but aren’t academics themselves. (Often there are not as many of these non-academic users of research as we’d like but one can always hope). To better understand marketing…
