Patag­o­nia has won plau­dits in recent years for their bold “Don’t buy this jack­et” cam­paign, instead win­ning loy­al­ty by build­ing rep­u­ta­tion among ded­i­cat­ed tar­get groups. The brand puts a thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ty and envi­ron­ment first, and busi­ness sec­ond, oper­at­ing as a vehi­cle in which con­sumers can engage on points of shared inter­est. Does oper­at­ing in this way, as more of a “social enti­ty” than a “social busi­ness” rep­re­sent a viable busi­ness mod­el for brands?

What Is Social Business?

The con­cept of a social busi­ness is far from new. In ear­ly 2013, Deb Mills-Scofield wrote about how “social busi­ness­es focus more on achiev­ing a pos­i­tive impact in each of the nine busi­ness mod­el ele­ments:

• Val­ue propo­si­tion.
• Cus­tomer seg­ment.
• Chan­nels.
• Rela­tion­ships.
• Key part­ners.
• Key activ­i­ties.
• Key resources.
• Costs.
• Rev­enues.

Writ­ing for Har­vard Busi­ness review, Mills-Scofield iden­ti­fied that “it [was] time we stop talk­ing about ‘social’ vs. ‘non-social’ and encour­age all entre­pre­neurs to focus on impact in every ele­ment of the busi­ness mod­el as well as the whole [and to] prof­itably and pur­pose­ful­ly bal­ance doing well and doing good.”

Philip Shel­drake’s excel­lent “Atten­zi – a social busi­ness sto­ry”, fur­ther expand­ed on the con­cept. Of it, he wrote:

“Social busi­ness is about adapt­ing the way in which an orga­ni­za­tion deliv­ers its mis­sion and pur­sues its vision by design­ing the orga­ni­za­tion around influ­ence flows, con­nect­ing: its peo­ple, part­ners, cus­tomers and oth­er stake­hold­ers; data, infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge in and all around it… more open­ly, pro­duc­tive­ly and prof­itably with the appli­ca­tion of social web, big data and relat­ed infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies.”

Def­i­n­i­tions of social busi­ness may dif­fer slight­ly, but social busi­ness is main­ly con­cerned with the nec­es­sary trans­for­ma­tion of dig­i­tal era busi­ness­es, and the need to cul­ti­vate a thriv­ing con­nect­ed envi­ron­ment, both in a com­pa­ny’s own busi­ness func­tions, and in the way it inter­acts with its con­sumers.

Social Business Now

Authen­tic­i­ty rep­re­sents a long-term com­mit­ment for any brand, and is a qual­i­ty that is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to social busi­ness. After all, many con­sumers nat­u­ral­ly favor brands that exhib­it ini­tia­tives for social enter­prise. Authen­tic­i­ty is a nat­ur­al pre­req­ui­site.

Today, sev­er­al con­sumer brands rec­og­nize this need to be authen­tic, and to devel­op con­nec­tions with their cus­tomers by address­ing their needs, griev­ances, or com­plaints.

One brand that has man­aged to nav­i­gate this with aplomb is cloth­ing brand Patag­o­nia, which has made a point of going against the grain in pre­vi­ous years, some­what counter-intu­itive­ly, by telling their cus­tomers not to buy their prod­ucts. Instead Patag­o­nia has estab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion among con­sumers for high-qual­i­ty, durable cloth­ing that does­n’t need to be replaced often, and con­sumers have done exact­ly what they were instruct­ed not to do.

The com­pa­ny once took out a full page adver­tise­ment in the New York Times run­ning the tagline “Don’t buy this jack­et”.

Inside Patagonia

Patag­o­nia is a great exam­ple of a brand embrac­ing social busi­ness, staunch­ly absorb­ing social respon­si­bil­i­ty into their core brand iden­ti­ty. For the brand, it’s no half-heart­ed effort; their web­site for exam­ple gives equal promi­nence to its Inside Patag­o­nia resource and the brand’s online shop.

Accord­ing to Nielsen, “55 per­cent of glob­al online con­sumers across 60 coun­tries say they are will­ing to pay more for prod­ucts and ser­vices pro­vid­ed by com­pa­nies that are com­mit­ted to pos­i­tive social and envi­ron­men­tal impact.”

The val­ue of social respon­si­bil­i­ty endeav­ors is clear, but Patag­o­ni­a’s efforts extend beyond even this. As an exem­plar for authen­tic­i­ty, Patag­o­nia exceeds typ­i­cal expec­ta­tions.

Patag­o­ni­a’s social endeav­ors exude a gen­uine authen­tic­i­ty that can’t be sus­tained with­out long-term com­mit­ment. Instead it comes across as a nat­ur­al part of the brand’s iden­ti­ty, as if Patag­o­ni­a’s founder Yvon Chouinard, a not­ed “moun­tain climber, fish­er­man, and envi­ron­men­tal­ist,” inject­ed a dose of his own per­son­al ethos into the Patag­o­nia brand.

Beyond Social Business: A Social Entity

The end result is that Patag­o­nia is viewed as more than a cloth­ing brand putting in a token social respon­si­bil­i­ty effort. The brand becomes more like a per­son, with a stance on eth­i­cal mat­ters, indi­vid­ual inter­ests, pas­times (fly fish­ing and adven­ture run­ning for exam­ple), and so on.

Patag­o­nia oper­ates as a vehi­cle in which com­pa­ny val­ues are an exten­sion of the peo­ple who com­prise the busi­ness. In this sense, the brand expands upon con­ven­tion­al under­stand­ings of what con­sti­tutes social busi­ness, to become a liv­ing social enti­ty – some­thing that peo­ple can relate and con­nect to.

For con­sumers, it means they can engage in a brand rela­tion­ship to a deep­er extent than they can for a brand that does­n’t have this “per­son­al­i­ty.”

Con­sumers cher­ish this oppor­tu­ni­ty to engage authen­ti­cal­ly. For exam­ple, the brand oper­ates a busy Tum­blr page where the most pop­u­lar posts are com­prised of users who share sto­ries of their well-worn Patag­o­nia items.

More recent­ly, the brand par­tic­i­pat­ed in an envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness exer­cise, “Vote the Envi­ron­ment,” which encour­aged peo­ple to share mes­sages about why they love a clean envi­ron­ment.

I vote the envi­ron­ment #becau­seilove surf­ing w/my kids in a clean ocean. You? Share at http://t.co/iRYbCfVX @Patagonia pic.twitter.com/jLqBrShI

— Jack John­son (@jackjohnson) Octo­ber 30, 2012

Run­ning under the #becau­seilove hash­tag, the cam­paign also won the par­tic­i­pa­tion of celebri­ties and musi­cians such as Jack John­son.

Allow­ing users to par­tic­i­pate in the con­ver­sa­tion like this is a great strat­e­gy for Patag­o­nia, and in 2013 Digi­day report­ed on how the brand’s “biggest chal­lenge is that [they] have more con­tent than [they] could pos­si­bly pub­lish, which makes it hard to fig­ure out what gets in and what does not.”

Should Your Brand Be A Social Entity?

There are more exam­ples of brands exhibit­ing the qual­i­ties a thriv­ing social enti­ty, in that the brand oper­ates with a gen­uine authen­tic­i­ty, and acts as a vehi­cle on which cus­tomers can devel­op a deep­er brand rela­tion­ship.

Vir­gin, for exam­ple, is imbued with a cul­ture for “mak­ing a dif­fer­ence” right from CEO lev­el. Addi­tion­al­ly, Cemex has intro­duced a social col­lab­o­ra­tion mech­a­nism in which employ­ees are able to col­lab­o­rate on social respon­si­bil­i­ty projects.

Patag­o­ni­a’s efforts are root­ed even stronger in the com­mu­ni­ty. After all, for them it does­n’t mat­ter if their cus­tomers bought from them recent­ly, if they bought some­thing 20 years ago, or even at all. Cus­tomers are able to engage with the brand on top­ics such as the envi­ron­ment or out­door sports, just as they would a friend or indi­vid­ual.

It would be fool­ish to sug­gest that busi­ness isn’t impor­tant, but as a mod­el, putting busi­ness sec­ond to the nur­tur­ing of a thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ty by oper­at­ing as a social enti­ty clear­ly has viable mer­it for Patag­o­nia, and may well do to for oth­er busi­ness­es, too.

Does your brand oper­ate as a social enti­ty? How?