In Response to "Social Value in Business Models and Products"
"The question arises: is the social value of the company and the product inextricable?"
I think Maggie did an excellent case analysis of how two companies with similar products integrated social values differently in their business model. However, I'd like to dive deeper into her analysis of TenTree's social impact and put forth other considerations in evaluating their ethics that can be generalized to other companies. I heavily agree that '1-for-1' business models like TenTree or TOMS attract specific customers that value social good and in turn drive sales. However, I am still slightly skeptical as many companies nowadays co-opt languages surrounding ethics and social good to market their products (for example, greenwashing and rainbow washing) without practicing any real accountability and transparency. This lack of accountability and transparency extends to the consumer as the average customer rarely truly understands where exactly their product comes from in terms of the the energy, resources and labor exhausted in the supply-chain.
For this reason, I'm not sure if consumers are 'investing in an environmental cause' (or any other social cause) when purchasing products from such companies. They might believe they do to justify their consumption or alleviate consumer's guilt but it's most likely that they're just putting dollars back into the company. The most ethical thing we can do as a society is to consume less in order to reduce embodied emissions. This notion, however, is diametrically opposed with businesses' primary goal of getting customers to consume more. It's impossible to achieve social good, especially those centered around envrironmental sustainability and climate change, through just the business sector.
I am always skeptical when social value becomes the unique selling point of a product. Something is always better than nothing but this "transactional" business model implies that social good is transactional -- that for every one tree planted, it offsets the 2,700 liters are consumed to produce a single cotton t-shirt. Every year, 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted from textile production. We can't simply plant away the climate crisis -- solving it requires sustained practices and shifts in culture / norms that often conflict with business themselves.