Does being ethical pay?

I just ran across an article in WSJ that answered the question,"How much are consumers are willing to pay for ethically produced goods?" These statistics are only among coffee drinkers (cotton t-shirt buyers had a much narrower range of price elasticity) but it's a good data point that the "conscious consumer" is no longer a niche market segment.

A recent study called Rethinking Corporate Responsibility by Fleishman-Hillard and the National Consumers League gives even more evidence. 52% of consumers seek out the CSR record of specific companies, and 82% say that social responsibility is influential in purchase decisions.

I think most companies understand this and are making efforts to improve their business practices. Some are leading the way and others are lagging, but for the most part I'm optimistic that progress is being made.

What about you... optimistic or pessimistic about businesses' abilities to meet both shareholder and consumer expectations?

Comments

[jenka]

Hi Jennifer! Just checked in here, and noticed the whole site's changed! That's super exciting about the new company you are starting.

I actually wrote something along the same lines as this post, "Does good matter?" -- http://social-creature.com/does-good-matter -- musing on that same WSJ piece, and touching on some exmaples from how Amerian Apparel and Good Magazine have approached the "ethical sell." Ultimately, I think it may all be about thinking ahead. No doubt a company’s environmental friendliness matters more now to the average consumer than it would have before the release of An Inconvenient Truth. And I’d be willing to bet that ethical production practices in general matter more to us now than they did before the wave of mass internet adoption hit, and access to information about a company’s practices became easily accessible to the average web surfer. The reasearchers in the WSJ peice even acknowledged that if 100% ethically produced products become the expected norm, anything less may be punished by consumers. It's all about planning for where consumer attitudes are headed in the future.

Looking forward to hearing more as Fruitful develops.