Social Enterprises

A marketing guru in Ateneo once said, a soap is a soap but what makes safeguard soap different? A fried chicken is a fried chicken , but what makes Jollebee fried chicken what it is today "langhap-sarap"? What makes people enter starbucks and buy one cup of coffee which is worth already 200 grams of coffee we buy in supermalls? I think we know the answer to that.

Sometimes, we don't just buy the products but we also buy what comes with it. Sometimes we buy also the ambiance and the good feeling that comes with the product.

This idea I always keep in mind when we promote social enterprises and social investing. Social enterprises and social investing are really different from the usual business approach. The only bottomline for non-social enterprise businesses is what we call PROFIT or MONEY. In social enterprise and social investing, we are looking both at financial return and social return. Perhaps to some this does not matter but I guess to others this really matters.

The social enterprises are contributing to poverty reduction or to simply say it, helping the poor and protecting the environment but at the same time earning profit.

The best scenario for me is when the poor are not merely beneficiaries of social enterprises but they also earn as investors of social enterprises. Would it be possible that the poor can be investors of social enterprises? Let us not forget that giant telecommunication companies in our country will not be successful today if only because rich people buy their products.

They are very successful because the farmers, the fisherfolks, the urban poor and even scavengers can now afford to buy cellphones and cellphone loads . The poor is indeed a vast market. The sad thing, despite the wealth and success of giant companies, such wealth does not reach the p poor masses, The wealth stays there on top.