eBay World Of Good with the Honorable Robert Chatwani

Stop Drop and Roll? That was so 2008…

* Successful B.o.P (Base of the Pyramid) approaches require self- sustaining models

* Don’t just:
Stop into “insert exotic locale here”
Drop boatloads of “insert well-intentioned donation here” ($, computers, health equipment)
Roll back home and wait for the magic

World of good @eBay

The topic of class today revolved around alignment between branding and social good platform. It is important to design and measure the metrics that would help build a business case for the impact social good initiatives have on the bottomline. The exampe of how Whirlpool’s campaign on “free refrigerator’s for habitat for humanity houses” increased their sales in that period and enhanced customer loyalty was an interesting approach to prove the point.

Robert Chatwani from eBay, discussed how his team is pioneering the idea of “socially good shopping”. I liked how he used analogical approach and said “Whole foods of online shopping”. It set the tone for his presentation. Just like the water on his shirt disappeared, I was getting more excited about the idea. He also mentioned about the core mission of eBay in two very meaningful words – “economic democracy”.

There were a number of interesting comments and questions which were raised by the class:

1. Who determines good versus bad about the products sold: This could be a subject of a long debate but someone has to start somewhere. Currently, Worldofgood.com is using associations for seller verification and product verification. The key thing to note is that the sellers are typically based out of US but they source goods from let’s say Africa/ India. Therefore, very less data is available about the sellers or the products.
2. Scale issues: How would you scale such a business requiring so much audit about the sellers and the products ? The question was valid especially because it is an entrapreneurship case within eBay. Abscence of scale will kill the initiative inside the multi-billion dollar eBay. Maintaing credibility of the marketplace would be one of the key metrics to watch while achieving scale.

Apart from some insights about the experiements at eBay, Robert mentioned how worldofgood has a very tight community. About 11% of the customers buy 50% of the slaes. Most of them were the initial on invitation seed customers.

“Shifting the dialogye from functional discussion to a social impact discussion” would be the key to how worldofgood emeges and eventually drives the entire online marketplace

Social good have to be good.

Can profit maximization and social good be produced with one company? The answer is yes, it can be achieved. But isn’t it easier to make strong PR that company do so and act totally opposite way in reality? Unfortunately the answer is yes as well.
Today’s guest speaker helped me to realize that 1.4 billion people of Earth live with $ 1.25 daily income. I have learned about this number sometime ago but I have never thought that corporations manipulate our minds with their claims to make those poor people’s lives better. Watching the world with realistic lenses we should admit that most of corporate social responsibility stories are just fairy tales for naive people. And I was thinking today: should we leave it like that? Why don’t we create anti-rating of multinational corporations who produce most useless social goods ? With modern social technologies breakthrough it would be not so difficult to investigate real supply chains. I believe the stronger stigma for corporation to produce fake social good and gain more profits because of that than not to produce social good at all. We need true stories about social good. We need inspirational stories about sincere social good. A pure material bailout without spiritual support is the destiny of cold-hearted top managers. “Down to earth” people need support with hope, passion, soul, and advice. I am rephrasing one of largest consumer electronic producer’s slogans: “Life. Let’s make corporations better”.