Business Bottom-line vs. Social Purpose

What’s the impact on business profits as they intersect with social requirements and challenges?

How can you build a competitive edge while incorporating social and environmental factors into your business strategy? 

Is social purpose a doable reality or an unattainable myth?

Increasingly, businesses are expected to adopt a social purpose that goes hand-in-hand with their operating process. Yet, there are few leaders that know how to walk this tight-rope – satisfying social challenges while strengthening performance.

This 4M Performance insight will escort you down the social purpose path while using the 4Ms to drive your business’s acceleration and success.

Strengthening Your Competitive Advantage

• You must develop a social-value proposition and use this to differentiate your Brand.
• Search for growth in areas your competition has overlooked. Brand Positioning: A Must for Success
• Use social activities and sponsorships to reinforce your market position.

Adapt To Industry Changes & Future Social Trends

• Establish a purpose that addresses social and environmental issues.
• Identify new opportunities by transforming social/environmental challenges into business opportunities.
• Implementing eco-friendly innovations that fundamentally improve your competitive advantage.

Develop & Execute ‘Your’ Unique Social Purpose

• Make the necessary operating changes that create a social purpose.
• Rally employees around the business’s social purpose and goals and request their input.
• Re-think your daily operations and how to overcome gaps in its social/environmental purpose.

Discover Ways To Drive Positive Change

• Copy the ways other high-performing companies have embraced their social purpose.
• Build new relationships with governmental and non-profit organizations.
• Work your social purpose into your donations and community involvement.

How To Deal With The Investment Community

• Understand how investors perceive your social purpose and its tie-in with your performance strategy.
• Use your social purpose as a means to addressing the environmental, social, and governance factors.

Expand Your Network

• Connect and work with a variety of business owners/managers from various industries and backgrounds.
• Build relations with a diverse group of peers.

The Un-achievable Triple Bottom Line: Can ESG Theory Go Mainstream?

Business is the activity of providing goods or services to consumers or other businesses with the goal of making a financial profit. Business is a risk/reward activity – work and investment are risked to beget financial return.

Today, in addition to work and investment a third element – social purpose – has been added to the risk side of the equation. Adding a social purpose will incrementally enhance a business’s financial performance – IF designed and executed properly!

Businesses can define and practice social purpose in many ways:

• Only purchasing from suppliers that ensure the health and safety of their employees.
• Improving the business’s environmental footprint by introducing energy conservation practices and policies in all of their facilities and offices. From electrical usage to water conservation.
• Redesign of packaging and materials usage and the proper recycling of waste throughout the organization.
• The support of community groups and other non-profits with donations, fund-raisers, and the encouragement of employee volunteerism.

For at least the last 20 years there has been increasing demand for businesses (of all sizes) to devote more resources to social purpose activities. The key is to link the social purpose initiatives to increased financial performance – and that link is communications.  Companies must communicate to customers, consumers, and other businesses their social purpose investments and activities.

Public Relations: Key Marketing Initiative

Be it pollution prevention, recycling, energy conservation, community involvement and contribution, whatever your selected social purpose, it must be communicated, marketed, and tied into your Brand. This necessitates the collecting and proper/correct reporting of your social purpose activities and their benefits. Only in this way can you enhance your bottom line via your social purpose.