I was doing my usual Sunday night search for blog topics when I fell upon the cover story of this week’s Business Week called Beyond the Green Corporation. You can imagine my excitement after reading the headline: “Imagine a world in which eco-friendly and socially responsible practices actually help a company’s bottom line. It’s closer than you think.” The first couple of paragraphs focus on the recent MFG efforts of Unilever:
Under conventional notions of how to run a conglomerate like Unilever, CEO Patrick Cescau should wake up each morning with a laserlike focus: how to sell more soap and shampoo than Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) But ask Cescau about the $52 billion Dutch-British giant’s biggest strategic challenges for the 21st century, and the conversation roams from water-deprived villages in Africa to the planet’s warming climate.
The world is Unilever’s laboratory. In Brazil, the company operates a free community laundry in a São Paulo slum, provides financing to help tomato growers convert to eco-friendly “drip” irrigation, and recycles 17 tons of waste annually at a toothpaste factory. Unilever funds a floating hospital that offers free medical care in Bangladesh, a nation with just 20 doctors for every 10,000 people. In Ghana, it teaches palm oil producers to reuse plant waste while providing potable water to deprived communities. In India, Unilever staff help thousands of women in remote villages start micro-enterprises. And responding to green activists, the company discloses how much carbon dioxide and hazardous waste its factories spew out around the world.
The article notes a number of other companies who are “doing well by doing good.” I will get to some of those others in later articles this week. Suffice it to say that if you aren’t thinking about Marketing for Good yet, it’s probably time. Rest assured, your competitors are.