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    Claus Schafhalter is executive level Management Consultant and owner of Sunogos - Change for the Better


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    There Is An App For That

    By Claus Schafhalter | March 30, 2010

    In an ear­lier blog entry I was mus­ing if cor­po­ra­tions gain ben­e­fits if they are act­ing respon­si­bly and in a sus­tain­able way. Being lean reduces waste and saves money, so there you have it. How­ever, another poten­tial big ben­e­fit would be to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one­self as the greener com­pany, let the con­sumer know about it, and bet that the con­sumer will buy your prod­uct if it is the greener and more sus­tain­able alternative.

    The big prob­lem for con­sumers is to know which prod­uct is ben­e­fi­cial in terms of sustainability.

    Bring on some apps for your favorite Nokia, Apple, or Android phone. One free app is called bar­coo (www.barcoo.de). All you have to do it to scan the bar­code on the prod­uct with your phone cam­era, and the pro­gram returns — among other infor­ma­tion — a sus­tain­abil­ity eval­u­a­tion for prod­uct and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany using a green / yel­low / red light sys­tem. The eval­u­a­tion uses “Cor­po­rate Social Respon­si­bil­ity”, infor­ma­tion and rank­ings are based on cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­ity reports, user eval­u­a­tions and research projects like WeGreen (Uni­ver­sity Berlin). Cur­rently this app is more use­ful in Europe than in the US due to its broader data­base for prod­ucts offered in Europe.

    I am sure that appli­ca­tions or mobile-accessible web­sites like bar­coo have a promis­ing future, espe­cially if they inte­grate best price infor­ma­tion, user reviews, prod­uct descrip­tions, and sus­tain­abil­ity index. Once this infor­ma­tion is eas­ily avail­able, con­sumer have all the infor­ma­tion they need to make informed choices. And in case con­sumers vote with their wal­lets for more sus­tain­able prod­ucts, cor­po­ra­tions that are greener than the com­pe­ti­tion will be able to reap big benefits.

    Don’t for­get to bring your smart phone for the next trip to the shop­ping mall!

    Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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