How a company conducts itself as an employer and corporate citizen matters greatly to an increasing percentage of buyers. For some buyers, these factors may equal or exceed the amount of weight they give the product/service offering and the Brand Experience.
For example, sustainability and green considerations have gone from feel-good considerations to mandates for certain Walmart product categories. Suppliers of laundry detergents either complied with Walmart’s new requirements that liquid detergents be concentrated (reducing the amount of water used in the products, thus reducing packaging materials, space requirements, and the fuel required to haul it in trucks) or risk losing Walmart’s business altogether.
In their just-released book Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, Laurie Bassi and her co-authors make the case that a convergence of social, economic, and political forces have ushered in a new era in business, in which good corporate behavior is no longer optional but the key to success. It's intuitive that companies conducting business in a responsible way would build superior brand equity and enterprise value. Good Company provides compelling research findings in support of that idea.
Given what we do at Marketwerks, the Good Seller chapter was particularly interesting. The authors set out simple principles that build customer loyalty and brand preference. "Restraint," one of their principles, really resonates. This is consistent with our advocacy of building sellers’ pricing power as a foil for adversarial buyers, not as a means of taking advantage of buyers. When exercising pricing power, companies will do well to remember it’s imperative to have customers keep coming back in the future.
Good Company is a fine read; thought-provoking, interesting, and actionable.