Corporate Citizenship

This time, it’s about consumers, ‘co-creation’ and ‘crowd-sourcing’… A clever marketing strategy/wheeze through which brands keep their consumers emotionally attached (and financially committed) by inviting them to ‘co-create’ new ideas for products and services.. Can’t fault the basic logic of this approach..an enthusiastic pipeline of free ideas that could potentially generate new markets and make [...]

Last month the CEO of ASDA spoke of the dawning of a new shopping experience. ‘There will be no ‘behind the scenes’ he said.  Carrot cams and cow-cams will reveal all about the way in which our food is produced and we will have the power to decide if we buy (or not) according to [...]

I went to an event the other evening, entitled ‘Many Heavens, One Earth: Faiths, the Environment, and Copenhagen’.  Oops. In light of various pronouncements in the past 24 hours that ‘the Deal is dead, long live the Deal’.. perhaps putting Copenhagen in the same sentence as ‘faith’ and ‘environment’ might have been a tad optimistic! 
Nonetheless, [...]

The debate has raged over whether ‘ethical spend’ is taking a hit now that we’re in a recession.  For every statistic that suggests it will (or is), another can be found to suggest the opposite is the case.  Witness headlines in both the Guardian and The Times in the same week last month:  From the [...]

I was struck by a comment in the editorial in today’s FT about the resignation of the government’s chief drug advisor Professor Nutt. At the heart of the row, the question of government moving from reliance on ‘evidence-based policy’ to one that seeks to do the opposite: find the right evidence it needs to justify [...]

For watchers of the responsible investment world, the recent ousting of five signatories from the United Nation’s Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) last month is an indication of the initiative’s growing muscle.
Increasingly, investment professionals have come to accept that environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues are part of their fiduciary duty and can affect [...]

Who’d have thought it. News of tube strikes in London has reached Shanghai.. Feeling rather blessed that I’m not there, and wonder why the Chinese should care if the Northern line is making lives in London miserable (again). After all, they have their fair share of urban woes to deal with. Not least a crackdown [...]