If Consumers did too much of a good thing, The Body Shop did too little. In the 1980's, promotional materials for the British-based body-care products company featured photos of co-founder Anita Roddick sitting in rain-forest clearings dickering with natives to buy their renewable products. It avowed that none of its products were tested on animals. Body Shop catalog covers promoted progressive causes. Roddick and husband Gordon became celebrated symbols of business with a conscience.

Then in 1994, a six-page exposé in the pages of Business Ethics detailed evidence that native peoples supplied less than 1% of the company's raw materials; that many of its ingredients were being tested on animals (although not by the Body Shop itself); and that its "natural" products included generous amounts of petroleum. The article also hinted that the corporation's well-publicized concern for social betterment was prompted as much by marketing aims as by conscience. After the public glimpsed the gap between rhetoric and reality, the companies stock prices plunged and sales slumped.

"They were 'green-painting'— environmental on the outside but not inside— and it came back to bite them," says Dan McKenna, president of Principle Profits Asset Management in Amherst, Mass., and investment advisory firm serving the socially conscious. "They saw their financial position suffer when the reality didn't live up to the image." Since then the company has begun to recover, matching its actions and rhetoric more closely.