| Greetings!
These days leaders in our sector (like those everywhere) are concerned about the down economy.
In this environment, it's wise to follow the old dictum "The best offense is a good defense." Companies and causes whose alliances create true value for one another and society will prevail in the long term.
For our part, we're redoubling our efforts to provide you with actionable information and the contacts you need to succeed.
David Hessekiel
President
Cause Marketing Forum, Inc. |
| Does Being Ethical Pay?
Study Says "Yes!" |
Consumers are willing to pay a small premium for ethically produced goods. But they'll punish an unethically made product even more harshly, by buying it only at a steep discount.
Those are the findings of a study by Canadian researchers published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. The study provides important confirmation of what years of opinion polls and anecodatal evidence have indicated.
The researchers showed consumers coffee and T-shirts. They told one group the items had been made using high ethical standards, another group that low standards had been used and provided a control group with no such information. "In all of the tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods," the researchers report. "But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount."
"What's more, consumer attitudes played a big part in shaping those results," the University of Western Ontario researchers say. "People with high standards for corporate behavior rewarded the ethical companies with bigger premiums and punished the unethical ones with bigger discounts."
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| In Case You Missed CMF6 |
 Instead of tooting my own horn, I'm very pleased to direct you to an excellent write-up of our sixth annual conference by Elisabeth Anderson of Changing Our World and OnPhilanthropy.com
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| J&J and Red Cross Settle |
 Ending a legal battle that began last August, Johnson & Johnson and the American Red Cross announced last week that they had settled their trademark dispute over the use of the red cross.
The agreement allows the company and the nonprofit to use the internationally recognized symbol.
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