Business school teaching case study: Can you put a price on impact?

September 3, 2026 - 03:27

A new teaching case study from a major business school asks a question that sounds simple but is anything but: can a company actually measure the good it does in the world, and then turn that into a number? The case centers on Natura, the Brazilian cosmetics giant known for using Amazonian ingredients and supporting local communities. The company has spent years trying to put a monetary value on the social, human, and environmental effects of its operations. Not just the obvious stuff like carbon emissions or waste, but also things like the income stability of small farming families and the preservation of traditional knowledge.

The idea is to move beyond vague corporate social responsibility reports and into something closer to financial accounting. If a company can say that a project created five million dollars in social value, it can compare that to the cost of the project and decide if it is worth repeating. Natura has been a pioneer in this area, partly because its entire business model depends on healthy ecosystems and the goodwill of local suppliers. If the forest disappears, so does the raw material for its best-selling creams and soaps.

But the case study does not pretend this is easy. Putting a price on a human life, or on the cultural value of a ritual plant, is messy. Some effects are easy to quantify, like the number of trees planted. Others, like the boost in a woman's confidence from earning her own income, resist neat calculations. The case asks students to consider whether Natura's approach is a genuine tool for better decision-making or just a sophisticated marketing story. It also raises a harder question: if a company fails to hit its own impact targets, should investors treat that with the same seriousness as a missed profit forecast? The answer is not clear, but the case suggests that the attempt to measure is itself a step forward, even when the numbers are imperfect.