The success of these programs from a business perspective has been widely acknowledged--with 83 percent of consumers saying that they have a more positive image of a company that supports a cause they care about and a full two-thirds saying that if price and quality are equal, they will purchase a brand associated with a good cause. In a survey of 1,000 consumers in 23 countries, six in 10 said that a company's social performance, including its labor practices, business ethics, and environmental impacts plays a vital role in the forming of their impressions of a company.

In fact, a good number of academic studies have found that there exists a correlation between responsible business practices and not only employee satisfaction, but overall positive financial performance. As Unilever's chairman, Niall Fitzgerald put it, "This is more than altruism--it makes good business sense."

And now, Wall Street is definitely paying attention. The Enron fiasco has shown us clearly that financial performances in the long term are influenced by ethics and firms not showing a clear commitment to the people side of the business on a global level will be much more severely scrutinized in the future. And the trust level corporations may have enjoyed with people in the past has been severely damaged as well. In a recent Golin/Harris survey a ratio of seven to one respondents said that they intend to hold businesses to a higher standard of behavior and communications. In this same survey a full 52 percent said that they are only "somewhat" confident that corporations will make business decisions "ìn my best interest," and 30 percent were only "slightly or not at all" confident!

Clearly from an Emotional Branding perspective there is still a certain kind of leap that needs to be made by many of these companies, even some of those who are the most active in the area of social responsiblility. The leap that must be taken today is to move beyond the concepts of philanthropy and "cause marketing" to that of building a comprehensive brand mission that incorporates ethical/social values in manifold ways and infiltrates everything the company does, including any social programs it supports. In other words, corporate responsibility must be written into the business model itself and the brand values need to evolve beyond merely being the "face" of the brand to inform the core operations of the business, which must become totally transparent.

A recent Fortune magazine article says, "If the 1980s were remembered for greed and the 1990s for shareholder value, it is likely that this decade will be remembered for one in which business models changed indelibly towards social outreach and a complete about-face in defining what the bottom line means to a company." Shareholders today are asking about these issues and requesting more transparency, as in the case of shareholders in Amoco, General Motors, and Ford asking their companies to report on carbon emissions and shareholders in Kraft and McDonalds requesting that the companies stop manufacturing products that contain genetically modified products.

And when we look at fiascos such as Enron, the once stellar example of successful Old Economy/New Economy transitions, we see the need for a real, viable substance of integrity to back up the brand promise. Enron's various shady transactions have come crashing down around it serving up a brutal (and hopefully instructive) lesson to Wall Street of the importance of looking a little further beyond opaque, intentionally complex financial statements, even when the numbers look great. The tolerance people have for situations like this, where employees' retirement accounts suddenly vaporize while Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, is sitting pretty now with the estimated $150 million of income he made in the last several years on stock options, is clearly dwindling rapidly. Other CEOs of major corporations such as Lucent, Kmart and WorldCom have also clung to their wealth while their companies stumble financially and employees lose jobs. The model of the future will be more along the lines of the gesture PepsiCo CEO, Roger Enrico has been making since 1998 by giving his $900,000 salary over to the PepsiCo foundation for scholarships for the children of employees who make less than $60,000 a year.

Everywhere we look we see evidence of this trend towards a fundamental shift in corporate values and consumerís expectations, and this is likely only to continue to intensify as Generation Y, very concerned with social causes comes into the full bloom of its cultural and economic power. This new atmosphere is the reason we see trends such as a consistent growth in socially responsible investing. In the year 2000 a total of $2 trillion in assets under management in the U.S. were in portfolios that had some form of screening for social responsibility criteria, as compared to $600 million in 1995. And, in the first six months of 2001 a dozen social and religious indexes and mutual funds hit the market as compared to six introductions in 2000.

People want to invest in companies that are in tune with their own social values. Acquisitions such as the purchase of Ben & Jerry's by Unilever, Aveda and Mac by Estee Lauder and Stonyfield by Dannon are also bringing a new set of corporate values that will influence the corporate culture of the acquirers. Besides buying a great business, they are also purchasing a very valuable Citizen Brand feather for their "corporate cap."

On a global level, I am fascinated by increasing moves by corporations to share their know how or resources with emerging nations, as in the case of Ted Turner of CNN's gift of $1 billion to the United Nations, and Coca-Cola's efforts to help with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. In the case of Coca-Cola, its efforts have little to do with traditional philanthropy or cause marketing--it is a different sort of endeavor altogether which may well be a harbinger of future corporate programs. Coca-Cola is contributing the trucks of their vast distribution network, which reaches into the most remote village as a way of helping with the very difficult problem of transporting educational materials, testing kits, and condoms to these areas. In this very practical, hands-on way the company is playing an important role--as a partner in the well-being of the lives of the people to whom it sells its product.

There has been a profound shift in the way the corporate world at large views the issues of globalization. In the past several years, we have begun to see protestorsí ideas making inroads in mainstream business culture. The protests in Seattle and Genoa and elsewhere have had a growing effect in serving as a wake-up call for governments and corporations alike and many have begun to listen to the complaints of these activists in a way that was previously unimaginable. For example, Shell's retired chairman, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart said last year, "Because we, too, are concerned at the requirement to address those in poverty who are excluded from the benefits that many of us share in the global economy, we share the objective of the recent demonstrators in Seattle, Davos, and Prague."

Brands such as The Gap, long under attack for sweatshop conditions in its factories worldwide would do well to pay critical condition to this trend. The Gap has a labor compliance department made up of 90 people who it claims work relentlessly to monitor and improve the conditions in these factories, and even admits that at times they were unaware of poor conditions in factories, but now they say they are on top of the problem. However, a certain "big brand arrogance" can be detected in their refusal, for example, to settle a suit against them from the garment workers in Saipan for $8.75 million. Other companies such as Sears and Calvin Klein named in the suit agreed to pay.

The problems of globalization of course are not easy problems to even begin to solve. Even when governments or corporations are trying by all intensive means to ìdo the right thing,î there are manifold, intertwined issues involved as well as the challenge of dealing with developing countriesí own policy failures. And, of course, just figuring out what that "right thing to do" is can be a daunting task. However, one thing is for certain: the tides are changing and these points cannot be shrugged away--they are the crucial issues for our times and from a branding perspective both the opportunities and the dangers that loom are huge.