Earlier this week, the Guardian, in association with Ben and Jerry’s, brought together leaders from multinational businesses, NGOs, media, and finance to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing values-led businesses in the current climate.
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Pete Cashmore of Mashable interviews David Jones, global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG Worldwide and co-founder of One Young World, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Among the topics: David’s new book, Who Cares Wins, and the power of social media to effect change.
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Not all global businesses are headed by forward-thinking leaders like Unilever’s Paul Polman or Marks & Spencer’s Sir Stuart Rose. But within large corporations there are often senior executives who understand that a move toward social responsibility and sustainability is the way forward. At the Global Social Business Summit in Germany in 2010, delegates were predominately from the nonprofit sector, but there were also a number of people from major corporations looking for ways to adopt social business initiatives and apply them to their own businesses.
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One of the biggest global TV hits of the past few years has been Mad Men—a program about the birth of consumerism in the traditional advertising world, which aired primarily on “traditional” media. Not only does the success of this show help to make the point that so-called traditional media is not yet dead, but it is also a great demonstration of the shift from a world of image to a world of reality.
The marketer’s job used to be about creating the best possible image for any product. No matter how divorced from the truth that image might have been.
Consider the signature “It’s toasted.” It sounds like the slogan for a delicious and nutritious food product. But the following exchange from the above-mentioned TV show reveals it is anything but:
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How much dead, obsolete, or simply unwanted electronic discards are lurking in basements, garages, and on shelves? In the Unites States alone, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, consumers in 2010 owned 2.4 million tons of electronic stuff they no longer wanted.
Find out where more of the detritus of the Digital Age is landing these days, in Adweek.
Image credit: Creative Commons/ÇP@flickr.com (Curtis Palmer)
Unless you’ve been sleeping in a Styrofoam bed, you’ve no doubt noticed ecomania taking a global hold on everything from how we travel to how we dress, to how we wash our faces. With so much concern for our environment, as well as a desire to not be wasteful in these uncertain economic times, look for more brands to jump on the green bandwagon as consumers continue to challenge companies to not only provide goods and services, but also to do good while doing it.
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| Tags: Coca-Cola, Gillette, green, Hilton, mindful consumption, New Consumer, Nike, packaging, Pepsi, Sustainability, waste 
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Guardian Sustainable Business is hosting a live broadcast of Unilever’s debate on how consumers can be inspired to turn positive intentions into actions. The event will see an international panel of experts–Unilever CEO Paul Polman; David Jones, global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG Worldwide; Tensie Whelan, president of the Rain Forest Alliance; and Malini Mehra, founder and CEO of Indian nonprofit Centre for Social Markets–come together to discuss how companies, brands, and people can help motivate the mainstream.
The event will be live-streamed on Tuesday, November 22, at 9 a.m. (EST) or 2 p.m. (GMT). Click here to register your interest or submit a question to the panel.
If you look into the mind and mood of 500 Americans, what kind of picture do you get?
A picture that is not pretty.
Actually, Americans would need a séance to make their spirits rise again, according to a study recently conducted by Euro RSCG New York. Worried Americans are concerned about everything from not having enough money when they grow old to the fact that there has been a great loss of civility and politeness in public life. In short, clearly we have lost our way, and anxiety is at an all-time high.
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There are plenty of respected voices that dismiss corporate social responsibility as a fuzzy distraction from the real business of business: making profits and delivering shareholder value. As the economist Milton Friedman put it: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
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IBM took the top U.S. ranking and placed second globally in Newsweek‘s newest list of the greenest companies. Click here to read about the complete findings, plus analysis by category.
