For 18 months, I’ve been making the case that marketers can do well be doing good. I still believe this. I have also tried to make Marketing for Good broader than CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) including quality engagements, product improvements, educational programs and even highly entertaining communications in MFG. One of the reasons for this is that CSR is one of those areas that feels like the right thing to do but is rarely held to the same accountability standards as other forms of marketing. I have no problem with CSR and in fact embrace it wholeheartedly as long as it represents a meaningful commitment by management and not just an insincere means of gaining customer preference.

Ironically, marketers that are doing well anyway tend to be the ones who have money left over for CSR. A short article in today’s New York Times called “Bottom Line on Doing Good” made this very clear:

“IT’S alluring and very much in vogue to connect social
responsibility with profitability,” an article in The Harvard
Business Review begins. “If you can make a business case for
positive social action, everybody wins — employees, shareholders and
society at large.”

That, of course, leads to the question: Is there such a link?

The issue has been studied to death. And after reviewing a huge
number of the studies, the writers say, the answer is that if there
is a link, it is “not a strong one.”

Joshua D. Margolis of Harvard Business School and Hillary Anger
Elfenbein of the University of California, Berkeley, say they
analyzed 167 studies conducted in the last 35 years that examined
the issue of whether social responsibility leads to increased
profitability and found that while it certainly did not hurt — that
is it did not diminish shareholder value — there was only “a very
small correlation between corporate behavior and good financial
results.”

And that minor correlation, they add, could be explained by the fact
that companies that have performed well over a long period of time
have enough money to contribute positively to society. Conversely,
corporate misdeeds, once they become known, do have a significant
negative impact on financial performance. So, intriguingly, it is
easier to prove the negative in this case.

“Perhaps the easiest way to communicate our findings is to say that
only 2 percent of the studies we reviewed showed that managers who
dedicate corporate resources to social performance — taking actions
that consider in the interests of society — impose a direct cost to
shareholders,” they write. “Companies can do good and do well, even
if they don’t do well by doing good.”

Recently a prospective client approached us about a CSR project. They asked about setting up a foundation that would support people who suffered from a disease their product could have helped prevent. This seemed like an interesting idea until we did some homework and found out a foundation already existed that met the same need. It was at that point we realized this client was not really committed to the problem but simply saw it is an opportunity to gain exposure. Ultimately we were able to talk them out of this avenue since the cost of setting up another foundation would really limit the dollars that actually went to help people in need. We also talked ourselves out of an assignment. In this case Good would not have been Great at all.