BrandAware

A few weeks ago I talked about Socially Responsible Investing, which is essentially ethical consumerism for stock investors.  I would like to now point out a website called kaChing.  In traditional methods of investment, usually one goes through a stock broker or pays for an online service to invest in stocks independently.  KaChing works a little differently.

KaChing identifies skilled traders who they have tagged ‘geniuses’.  What you can do as a novice investor is find an investor whose trading methodology you like and ‘mirror’ their actions.  So basically this means that you automatically buy or sell whatever the pro investor buys or sells.  You can do this with either a pretend money account or you can invest for real.  Since most things are automated, this cuts out a lot of the service fees and allows you directly monitor what you are investing.  It’s an interesting concept for the financial world.

The reason I wanted to tell BrandAware readers about this is because this creates a great opportunity for someone who is knowledgeable about socially responsible investing to set up an account that others could follow.  Wouldn’t it be great to follow someone’s investments whose morals are in line with your own?

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an investor on this website that specializes in SRI yet.  If anyone is interested in this or does know of someone doing SRI on kaChing, please shoot me an email.  In the meantime, there’s always MicroFinance.



More info: kaChing

The Christmas season is descending upon us, and with that comes a massive increase in consumer shopping.  I'm going to be talking a lot more about how to be an ethical shopper this Christmas, but one thing you can do right now is install the Knowmore.org Firefox extension.  (If you're not using Firefox, you should be.)

If you haven't checked it out yet, Knowmore.org is a wikipedia based database of ethical brand related issues.  The great thing about the firefox add-on is that while your just surfing around websites, the add-on will notify you with a little pop up if you stumble onto a website they have in their database.  For example, if I go to the Best Buy website, Knowmore will inform me that they have brand information on that company.  From there it's completely up to the user whether or not to look into more information about that particular company.

Basically, it is a really easy way to get user-relevant information when looking at online stores, so be sure to give it a try!

Knowmore Add-On

If only sustainability were as easy as scanning a product, right? CO2Code is a recent start up that seeks to make the whole process easier. When a company chooses to carbon offset their products or production. CO2Code then gives the company a barcode to put onto their products with an ID number. Consumers can then take the ID number from the product they bought and see how it carbon offset and to what extent.

More information about how products are being offset would be a great plus for companies that choose to use this service. (You guys know how much BrandAware loves to see companies providing information.)  However, there are a few potential drawbacks to this system. The first drawback being that if I have to buy the product and then take it home to input the information in the CO2Code website, then I may have already bought a product from a company whose sustainability practices are not up to my standards. From a company's standpoint, why use the intermediate CO2Code? A more direct way of doing this would be for companies to simply print clear and accurate information directly on their products and on their websites.

CO2Code