The concept of voting with your dollar is not new.
Most reasonable people would rather support a good company over a bad one, even if it costs a little more.
While people want to do the right thing, it is difficult for reasons including:
- Disinformation and polarization make it impossible to know who to trust.
- In this age of short attention spans and busy lifestyles, asking consumers to fully understand their impact is asking a lot.
- There are limited choices at stores, and most products sold come from a handful of huge companies.
- The age of massive conglomerates and multi-national corporations makes it difficult to understand the true owners of the brands you see in stores.
- Advertising makes it difficult to separate truth from hype.
These are tough challenges to be sure. But with your help we can make real progress toward understanding the real impact of our purchasing decisions.
We’re putting together some resources to give you and concerned consumers like you the ability to truly understand where the money you spend at the cash register ends up. What you are actually impacting with your purchasing decisions.
We also think it’s vital that the business community is engaged as a partner rather than an adversary. To that end, the #AskBusiness campaign encourages individuals, concerned groups and the business community to work together to create a platform to understand the full impact of individual brands and the corporations behind them.
The ultimate goal is to align the priorities of society at large with those of business, so that both are working together to achieve common goals.
So given that:
- We want to make progress toward improving our many our societal ills, and
- Businesses want to make money.
We just need to make it so that companies that hep the common good make more money, and those that don’t make less.
No doubt it’s a process, one that won’t be easy. But I have no doubt that it’s the best chance we have.