When a positive exchange between a brand and customers becomes quantifiable metrics, it encourages brand to provide better service, customer service to do a better job, and consumers to actively show their gratitude.

More brands are waking up to their social responsibility and doing good work through cause marketing campaigns. Yet too many still go about it the wrong way. I mean 'wrong' in two senses. Firstly, they are marketing ineffectively, and secondly, as a consequence their positive social impact is not maximized.

More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.

The most impactful way consumers can assert their power is to become mindful shoppers, giving their dollars only to socially responsible companies. In today's world of social media and smart phones, this is easy to do.

Let's hope brands recognize that the true power of this technology is not its reach but its ability to communicate substance that adds meaning to our lives. Otherwise, brands will be investing in technology that consumers simply won't buy.

Today's consumers are eager to become loyal fans of companies that respect purposeful capitalism. They are not opposed to companies making a profit indeed, they may even be investors in these companies - but at the core, they want more empathic, enlightened corporations that seek a balance between profit and purpose.

What today's business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically, socially, ethically, and morally.

If capitalism is to remain a healthy, vibrant economic system, corporations must participate in taking care of the society and the environment in which they live.

We need to develop and disseminate an entirely new paradigm and practice of collaboration that supersedes the traditional silos that have divided governments, philanthropies and private enterprises for decades and replace it with networks of partnerships working together to create a globally prosperous society.

Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.