Good For Business

BMW is driving an X1 around the USA to 12 spots of great natural beauty  
and taking some photos of each one on Instagram, and cross posting them to a  
Facebook application.
For each like, on Facebook or Instagram, BMW donates $1 to that national park. 
Simple.  
{Sidenote: The USA is a really remarkable terrain. Huge. Incredibly varied.
Cosmopolitan Europeans like myself pull out that old factoid that not many 
Americans have passports, and therefore don't travel internationally.
 
I'm big on travel. 
 
Travel makes you smarter and nicer - 
it is "fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" to steal from Mark Twain.
International travel moreso, because you are forced to reflect on embedded 
cultural assumptions more and thus see similarity where before you 
might see difference.
 
But, goodness me, there is a lot of very different beauty to see in the USA.}
 
Head over to Restore the Outdoors and like some nature. 
 
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I believe people should be good because they want to be good, 

not because they seek reward or fear punishment. 

If you want to change the world, as so many entrepeneurs claim, the easiest, 

most reliable, way, is to be nice to people as they pass through your life. 

However, despite recent legal sillyness, corporations are not people, 

and they are fundamentally economic institutions.

So asking them to DO GOOD THINGS without providing them

[back in 2008 i suggested we make 2009 the year of GOOD THINGS in marketing, 

instead of doing another YEAR OF MOBILE.] 

an economic rationale is like, well asking them to believe in the power of brands 

without having a financial conversation.

Even if we fold something that's demarked as a cost, like CSR, into, say, 

Cause Related Marketing, we face the problem that marketing spend itself is 

often considered discretionary, rather than a true investment.

So a few years back I wrote the bare bones of the following paper 

for the CEO of an investment bank, in order to provide a business case  

for social brand behaviour he could take to his board, using financial evidence or 

business studies as much as possible.

[Evidence is important - there are lots of footnotes in the paper - and the nature 

and source of that evidence is important too, tailored to the audience and 

what they find credible.] 

Recently I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing again, 

so I updated the paper.

It presents the thesis that Milton Friedman helped create a binary opposition 

between society and stakeholders, that isn't necessarily true, and that we can 

"Square the circle, and present a business case, in financial and 

strategic terms, palatable to predictably irrational investors, that 

demonstrates why ethical, socially responsible business isn't a cost, 

but a driver of increased returns and profitability."

I hope you find it interesting or useful, either way I'd love to hear what you think.

Download Good for Business - @faris