Ethical Marketing on: Dr. Bronner’s

Consumer demand for ethically produced cleansing products has intensified in recent years, and although there are literally hundreds of brands of soap available on the market, few are as unique or memorable as Dr. Bronner the top-selling organic liquid soap brand in America.

If you’ve ever bought or seen a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap, you’ll already know that the company is a little different to other soap companies. For starters, the product’s unique packaging features the company’s fascinating ‘’Cosmic Principles,’’ a 30,000-word philosophical screed that company founder and self-styled doctor Emanuel Bronner spoke of while touring the United States’ lecture circuit in the late 1940s. Bronner offered his now-famous peppermint liquid soap as a freebie for people who attended his lectures, but it didn’t take long for him to realize most people would only turn up at his speeches to grab their free sample of soap.

It wasn’t just Emanuel Bronner who demonstrated a commitment to social and environmental activism. Bronner’s grandson, David, was arrested in 2012 for publicly harvesting hemp from inside a locked cage outside the White House, a stunt orchestrated to protest what David Bronner felt was the federal government’s undue oversight of hemp production in the United States.

 

In the years since the cage incident, David Bronner has been extremely active in many areas of social and environmental justice, including the fight for greater oversight into the labeling of products that include genetically modified ingredients.

How Does Dr. Bronner’s Use Ethical Marketing?

Dr. Bronner’s is such a unique brand because of the eccentricity of its founder. Indeed, it,s hard to imagine how different the Dr. Bronner’s brand would be without the ‘‘Moral ABCs’’ that Bronner lectured about shortly after World War II.

As a result of the company’s unorthodox founding, Dr. Bronner’s is uniquely positioned to leverage its history of ethical manufacturing in its marketing. In many ways, the company’s iconic product packaging serves as the perfect introduction to the firm’s philosophy; I often find myself reading the Moral ABCs while showering.

Of course, the company’s commitment to what it calls ‘‘constructive captalism’’ goes far beyond its unusual packaging and mission statement. Dr. Bronner’s is what’s known as a Benefit Corporation (or B-corp), a designation that states such companies must be for-profit operations that have a ‘‘positive impact on society and the environment according to legally defined goals.’’

To this end, Dr. Bronner’s succeeds admirably. The company is committed to several tangible objectives, including raising awareness of crucial environmental and social justice issues, the use of USDA-certified fair-trade ingredients whenever possible, and to equitable compensation structures that limit executive pay to five times that of lower-level employees. (For a little perspective, dunkin’ Donuts CEO Nigel Travis said in 2015 that paying workers a minimum wage of $415 per hour was ‘‘absolutely outrageous’’ despite the fact that he personally ‘‘earn’’ approximately $4,889 per hour.