My youngest sister, mother to my nephew, is pretty dedicated to consumer responsibility - she wants to make informed choices about the products she buys. She wants to support businesses that are responsible and ethical. This is a horrendously complicated process - there are so many variables to consider and there’s the implicit prioritization of certain problems. A company who uses organic fibres might have them manufactured by sweat-shop labour. A company that produces reusable containers might dump toxic chemicals used in manufacturing into the waterways. How does a consumer stay abreast of these things?

Just as importantly, how do you incent corporations to become responsible by rewarding them for good behaviour. Organizations, more than any other system is are susceptible to operant conditioning, and all the rules apply. Thus you must, as a customer find a way of connecting your business with corporate responsibility. You need a way to tell Second Cup or Starbucks or whomever, that you’re buying that coffee at least in part because you support corporate responsibility.

My idea would be to construct a non-profit organization that releases a loyalty card. This non-profit would research businesses, discover those that are responsible organizations and negotiate a membership listing wherein member organizations can implement loyalty programs like discounts, reward points etc using this single, unified card. This would allow smaller businesses to start a loyalty program, it would interface cleanly with existing loyalty programs of established firms and the customer would have a card that’s usable in mutliple businesses (instead of a separate card for each one).

It would have an architecture similar to Air Miles or the SPC (Students Price Club) except it would be a non-profit agency.

Moreover, if the the user base of this card grows large enough, the organization can use company’s desires to compete as bargaining chips in enforcing greater responsibility. “You want to add X loyalty points per purchase, this will probably bring you X dollars in profits? Fine, make these alterations which will cost you 0.1X.”

Then it becomes a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.

Obviously this would need some rather substantial angel investment to get off the ground - multi-millions of dollars. But by saving the customer a lot of work and providing a transparent, non-profit organization that is subject to review from other orgs you could create a checks and balance system that, although not perfect, would alleviate a lot of the guilt burden customers feel when they purchased based solely on price.

Posted by Jeremy on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 pm.