Consumers

Studies of CRM suffer from the Mandy Rice Davis put-down "Well they would say that, wouldn't they?" - a human tendency to overstate one's virtues. What's significant here is the clear and very believable upward trend in awareness and participation. Also significant is the hard evidence cited from case studies of individual campaigns, such as Persil's 13% sales uplift during Comic Relief compared to the previous 12 weeks, with 1% continuing after.

For companies with consumer brands, thanks to BitC's excellent series of studies, the weight of evidence is now so overwhelming that only the most perverse marketing director can deny the opportunities. Charities with a suitable cause are also benefiting greatly. Less clear is the impact of consumer purchasing power on making the world a better place.

Here The Co-operative Bank's annual Ethical Consumerism Report (as we report opposite) shows a positive trend but from a very small base - with the market share for ethical goods and services still less than 2%. Possibly more powerful are boycotts, the flipside to CRM: half of consumers (52%) say they have switched away from at least one product in the last 12 months for ethical reasons (though Mandy Rice Davis would be rightly sceptical of the size of that claim too).

Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 73 - January, 2004