Neither nationwide purse-tightening nor cries of Slactivism! Greenwashing! and Fad! have shaken cause marketing. Eighty-three percent of consumers “want more of the products, services and retailers they use to benefit causes,” according to Cone Inc.’s 2010 Cause Evaluation Study. But how do you do cause-related marketing (or cause branding) right? Pick a cause you care about. [...]
How does a physician with sufficient medical knowledge and analytic ability distinguish himself? He measures high on the empathy scale. Once a physician gets past a certain threshold of analytic ability, he’s proven himself to be an okay doctor on the functional front, so the point of differentiation becomes his empathic abilities. When the Jefferson [...]
Don’t call it a community and don’t plan to build one unless it will offer real value to the people who participate. Not just to you or your brand or the top-dogs within the community. That’s called marketing or complicit back-scratching, but not community in a sense of deep give and take and shared value, [...]
Rather than doing the industry in, cause-washing might just save corporate sustainability. Although consumer trust is worse than we thought, the anecdote has the potential to alter the way companies do business and consumers shop. Less than one percent of people (surveyed recently by BBMG in partnership with B Lab) trust company advertisements or statements [...]
In the last four days that I’ve been back in the states I’ve had to pay for bags three times (at CVS, Ikea and Trader Joe’s). It’s a surprising and welcome development, particularly as I’m not in California or Boulder, but in Washington, D.C. My reaction to the pay-for-bag-system has also evolved in step with [...]
I came to the whole idea of social impact and business after several frustrating experiences–working for a business lobbying organization that (not shockingly) ran against my values, becoming privy to the status quo inefficiencies of traditional international economic development and suffering alongside my nonprofit clients as they focused more on fundraising and philanthropic realpolitik than constituent [...]
This past week I’ve run into a lot of misconceptions about social responsibility and business. Taken from conversations with professionals “outside the sector” to those influencing it, from articles, blog posts and comments, here are this week’s top-eight fallacies about corporate social responsibility (CSR). .. It’s a new movement, so there’s time before my company [...]
Within the world of social enterprise, there’s a subsect of organizations that help incubate and scale social ventures. These entities, from veterans Ashoka and Echoing Green to young buck Unreasonable Institute, play varying roles of investor, connector, teacher and trend-chronicler of a rising-star sector. To look beyond the magazine gloss and speculation and get a [...]
I’m not the first to make the case that crowdsourced social good contests should retreat quickly into the night. They’re inefficient at creating change; Their current popularity has diminished the value they bring to companies and brands; Consumers are fed up with them (how many vote-for-me solicitations do you get a week that make you feel [...]
When I talk about the benefits of building a business with a social mission, consumer support and loyalty come up a lot. One of the rewards of being a socially driven company is that consumers like to buy from you and will often take it upon themselves to share your mission with others. A new [...]
I'm Olivia Khalili. I created Cause Capitalism to show you how to grow your business by incorporating a social mission. 
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