Media & Communications

Kroger, in partnership with Fair Trade USA, announced today that its Simple Truth® brand will expand in 2018 to offer more Fair Trade Certified™ products. The Simple Truth® brand’s current portfolio of Fair Trade products spans multiple commodities, including coffee, cocoa, coconut, tea, sugar and agave, and leads the private label grocery industry in Fair Trade offerings.

Although it may seem counterintuitive for a company to discourage consumers from buying its products, we have seen this strategy work in brands’ favors in the past – Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign resulted in an overwhelming positive response from consumers who took extra time to learn about the brand’s mission before making a purchase. Now, one company with a notoriously controversial product is attempting to pivot its business model to be more socially responsible – and marketing directly to consumers during this transition.

As we all quickly learned after the January 20 inauguration, the U.S. signaled it would be pulling out of the historic Paris Climate Accord – to become at some point in 2018 probably the ONLY country standing by itself. At least at the [Federal] governmental level.

And so, Trend #1, writes Andrew Winston, is the “Newtonian equal-and-opposite reaction from business, states, and cities – nothing short of amazing – their pushback on policy decisions is my #1 story of 2017.”

Wells Fargo & Company and Scholarship America announced they are accepting applications for the 2018 Wells Fargo Veterans Scholarship and Wells Fargo Veterans Emergency Grant Programs. In 2016, Wells Fargo committed $2 million over a four-year period to fund the programs and help veterans and spouses of veterans with disabilities succeed in careers they choose. Since the programs launched, 48 scholarships and 84 emergency grants have been awarded.

Sodexo, world leader in Quality of Life Services, today announced the upgrade of SodexoMyWay, a digital platform enabling customer-driven e-commerce dining websites with dynamic content that will predict content for the user, enhancing their digital experience. The upgrade to the website platform includes an upgraded mobile-first technology for ease of access across multiple devices. Using the newly-released SDL/Tridion (Web 8.5) content management system, this upgrade across Sodexo’s 700-site ecosystem marks the largest deployment of Web 8.5 in the world to date.

By far the best thing CEOs and their companies can do to combat sexism, gender discrimination, and sexual misconduct–in short, to support women–is to put diverse women into half of the positions of power and leadership. This is how we resolve a foul, permissive culture.

Please join us on Wednesday, January 10 from 1-2 p.m. EST as we review what was trending in 2017 in our “A Year in CSR: A Look at the Top 10 CSR Trends of 2017” webinar. Cone’s Executive Vice President of CSR Strategy, Alison DaSilva and Director of Marketing/Research & Insights, Whitney Dailey will take a closer look at how leading companies and organizations leveraged insights to drive action – and what this means to the broader business world. For a glimpse at what we’ll discuss in greater detail, see our byline in Triple Pundit.

The Major League Baseball Players Association had quite a year in 2017, on and off the field, as the union began its second 50 years of advancing and protecting players' rights.

In our household we do our best to avoid buying bottled water - we're keenly aware of what those darn plastic bottles are doing to the environment. Instead, we just drink our tap water - it's safe and delicious, because we live in San Francisco, and our water is sourced from the magnificent Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.

The annual New Year’s Raffle is taking place aboard all of the ships in the AIDA Cruises fleet. The proceeds from the raffle will once again go to a number of different projects.

For more than ten years, AIDA Cruises has supported the work of SOS Children’s Village with its worldwide projects for disadvantaged children. Thanks to our guests, it has been possible to support various SOS Children’s Village measures in Germany, Africa and the Philippines with donations totaling over one million euros.