The retailer Patagonia has as a part of its corporate values a reverence for the environment, it is a core part of their corporate values, and highly relevant to their target market. They wear their hearts on their electronic sleeves by opening up their demand chain on all products to observation and criticism.
An integral part of their web presence is the Patagonia Footprint Chronicles site that provides some details the provenance of all their products with the opportunity for consumers to provide feedback.
This simple, transparent, exercise must be a source of huge value for the Patagonia brand, that targets high quality, and environmental sensitivity in everything they do. This sort of brand transparency is likely to become far more common as consumers increasingly demand facts rather than slogans from marketers, and marketers recognise the competitive value of demand chain transparency, enabled by the web 2.0.
