But today's sophisticated, well-educated consumers are not only interested in your new product, they want to know more about the company that produced it, the labor conditions under which it was produced, and how its production impacted the environment. Your corporate brand is a halo over all your brands, and consumers prefer to trust your whole enterprise when they buy from you. They want the brand and its corporate owner to reflect their own social and environmental attitudes, as well as their personal tastes.

In recent years, "sustainability reports" have proliferated, appearing alongside annual reports to detail just how socially responsible a company is. Sustainability reporting seeks to produce the same level of transparency for a company's social and environmental numbers as is available for the traditional financials. The point is that companies have stakeholders beyond their investors, and these people also need a complete scorecard on the firm. "What gets measured gets done." Inspired by the design of annual reporting, these sustainability reports have moved beyond the bottom line (financial), to the double bottom line (financial and social/environmental), to the triple bottom line (financial, social, and environmental), which breaks out all three separately.

Charitable giving may be the most visible and measurable part of CSR. In 2004, Wal-Mart gave $188 million in donations to social causes; Johnson & Johnson, $121.8; and Target, $107.8. In its latest report, Starbucks noted $30.3 million in cash and in-kind global donations. Procter & Gamble donated over $100 million to various causes, including its worldwide Children's Safe Drinking Water program. Thoughtfully designed programs that reach around the world are being called "strategic philanthropy," since they combine the desire to give with the desire to open up new country-markets.

Charitable giving may reflect a company's willingness to give back to society, but it also naturally attracts consumers similarly sympathetic to the targeted causes, which means these social investments impact the original bottom line through more sales. But there is more to measure in CSR than summing up donations or rating their impact simply as a promotional event in a marketing mix study. If the thrust of CSR is to report the impact a company has on society, doesn't it make sense to measure that company's social impact in real economic terms?

In October 2006, in Amsterdam, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) will release the latest guidelines for sustainability reporting, G3. The GRI is the international organization that was established in 1997 to create "a generally accepted framework for reporting on an organization's economic, environmental, and social performance." This latest reporting framework should go a long way to clarifying the use of the term economic, which has for too long been thought of as synonymous with financial.

As a result of the new framework, indirect economic impacts will now be listed in sustainability reports to describe public investments and services, as well as their measurable impact. How will this be done? It will probably vary from company to company, with the most progressive wanting solid numbers. The science of economics will give it to them.

Consumer goods suppliers and retailers are already using advanced econometric modeling to answer how the greater economy impacts their business. Those that are catching up to CSR or leading the movement are turning that equation around to ask, "How do we impact the economy?"