Steven’s post from last week calls attention to The Body Shop, a business which is especially interesting to examine not only in light of what we’ve learned about corporate social responsibility and traditional entrepreneurship, but also in light of our class today about social entrepreneurship.

Steven highlights the ways in which The Body Shop’s founder, Anita Roddick, was an entrepreneur, but in ways that remind me of the social enterprises we discussed today. Although The Body Shop certainly is an entrepreneurial venture, it likes to strongly emphasize its CSR to the extent that, as I found while perusing its website, it sometimes almost portrays itself as a social enterprise. The website quotes Roddick, “The business of business should not just be about money, it should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed.” Notably, she calls for “public good” as business’s goal instead of “private greed,” thus seeming to place greater importance on societal change than on maximizing profit. Were this The Body Shop’s mission statement, The Body Shop might be classified as a social enterprise rather than a traditional business, making the company an intriguing one to consider when thinking about the definitions of traditional and social entrepreneurship.

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems is a software company that exhibits the four primary characteristics that define an entrepreneurial venture:

1. Amount of wealth creation: Adobe generated $943 million in profits in 2010.

2. Speed of wealth creation: Adobe took off rapidly, releasing PostScript a year after its inception and Illustrator five years after its inception, both of which are still in extremely wide use today.

3. Risk: Founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke sustained a significant amount of risk by forming a new company in the volatile technology industry.

Entertainment retailer HMV has announced that they will be closing their flagship Robson store and replacing it with another downtown store 80 to 90 percent smaller. This comes as a result of the growing trend of consumers acquiring media such as music and movies online, coupled with high rent.

James Smerdon of Colliers International estimates that the rent of the 50,000 square foot downtown store is around $60 to $80 per square foot, which equates to a sizable cost of around $3.5 million in rent. HMV Canada’s total sales in 2011 are (on a pro-forma basis) around $357 million, which means an average of around $3 million sales in each of the 121 Canadian stores. Of course, the giant Robson store would be expected to have sales well above this average. But this $3 million still gives an idea of how difficult it has been for the flagship store to break even when compared to the $3.5 million fixed cost of rent.

Other stores in downtown Vancouver of comparable size are few, and include much more diversified retailers such as The Bay. In hindsight, it’s perhaps surprising that a massive store selling music and movies – a market long known to have gone digital – wasn’t closed sooner.

Coca-Cola’s new white cans, part of the company’s “Arctic Home” marketing campaign in support of polar bears, hit shelves today and will remain there for the holiday season. This is a fascinating move for Coke because it “has spent billions of dollars over the years” branding its iconic cans as red. What made Coke decide to risk this, as well as likely a significant amount of redesign and marketing costs?

Coke is trying to continue to participate in the ever-growing sustainability trend, probably hoping to gain a short-term sales boost as well as strengthening its brand for the long-term. Matt Scheckner from AdvertisingWeek noted that this campaign allows Coke to connect customers’ head, heart, and wallet.

Katie Bayne, Coke’s president of sparkling beverages, claimed that what “big, iconic brands can and should do is point out things that matter.” What struck me is that she said brands such as Coke “should” raise awareness about ethical or sustainability issues. This resonates with what Green to Gold authors Andrew Winston and Dan Etsy (Etsy, perhaps not coincidentally, sits on Coke’s Environmental Advisory Board) wrote – that consumers are increasingly “expecting” companies to take initiative in regards to social issues.