'ethical mark fatigue': eth·i·cal mark fa·tigue [eth-i-kuhl mahrk fuh-teeg]
1. The confusion and inertia experienced by mainstream, 'light green' consumers, resulting from overexposure to ethical certification marks, including Fair Trade, Soil Association, Forest Stewardship Council, Rainforest Alliance, Utz Kapeh, Against Animal Testing, Rugmark, etc.
In my line of work, if you want to talk about ethical consumerism, you have to get your head around three completely different camps: those making ethically certified products, many of whom are passionate about taking an 'ethical first' approach; those retailers wanting to incorporate these ethically marked products into their offering, for a variety of reasons; and the mainstream consumers who are getting exhausted and paralysed about the 'ethical mark' glut staring out at them from their grocers' shelves.
It's this latter group that I think is experiencing 'ethical mark fatigue' - friends ask me, since I am 'social', which is better - buying Fairtrade to support producers in the South, or buying local to minimise carbon miles? When faced with Fairtrade OR Organic, which is 'better'? How about Fairtrade vs. ethical packaging? It's exhausting - I just tell people to do their best, do their homework, do what makes sense to them, and try to achieve a balance - but I have no idea if that's the right advice.
It's an interesting trend that will affect those two other groups I mentioned - the ethical brands themselves, and the retailers who carry them (or, increasingly the UK, develop in-house ethical products, like Tesco's own Fairtrade stuff). And more and more, from the retailer end, I am observing a macro approach that is moving the emphasis away from the particular benefits of each specific ethical mark, and moving it toward a holistic ethical shopping experience. Of course Whole Foods figured this out ages ago - you don't go to Whole Foods to buy Fairtrade or Organic or GM-Free, you go to Whole Foods to buy whatever it is Whole Foods is offering, because they are generally 'ethical'.
So take Marks & Spencer in the UK. Their 'Plan A' (tagline: 'Because there is no Plan B') commits them across a range of metrics: climate change, waste, sustainable raw materials, fair partnerships, and health. Whole Foods aside, in the mainstream this looks to me like a new proposition. M&S is telling us, 'Stop fretting about This vs. That. Shop here, and we'll do the heavy lifting to make sure that being an M&S consumer means being an ethical consumer.'
This has a few implications worth considering. On the positive side, M&S are experts in their own supply chains, which are far-reaching. Add that to their sheer size and the potential for scale and scope of impact is great. Another positive is that if mainstream retailers go ethical in a big way (like, if H&M were to use only ethically produced fibres across all lines, instead of having a small line of organic cotton clothes), 'ethical consumerism' will become, well, just 'consumerism'. Kind of a nice vision for the future.
And now the negatives - the biggest for me is that this trend might give consumers the day off on discerning between different versions and levels of 'ethical'. If my retailer is 'ethical', great, I can just shop there - but how ethical are they? Most clothing certainly won't come close to the high ethical calibre achieved by the likes of People Tree (www.peopletree.com). And what if internal pressures or politics cause the decision makers at this big retailer to choose one ethical path and ditch another - for example, could a food retailer, for totally non-ethical reasons, push Fairtrade and stop bothering with local food, forcing on the consumer a monopolised ethical economy?
A couple of things are clear:
1. The market for ethical marks is officially oversaturated. Please, no more.
2. That oversaturation doesn't mean we should do away with the whole system - indeed, those pioneers in ethical marking are largely what's gotten us to such widespread ethical consumer trends.
3. If retailers are going to change the game, placing ethical behaviour and monitoring in their own hands rather than those of the individual brands, we are going to have to keep them accountable. H&M and the Fairtrade Foundation are fundamentally different animals, driven by different economic goals, and it will be up to external bodies, consumers (and maybe governments?) to verify retailers' claims and keep them honest.
See you at the store...
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
"social" purists, dot.coms, and lessons about toast
The Guardian newspaper here in the UK recently interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the VP for technical strategy and innovation at IBM, who is about to retire.
What on earth has this got to do with anything?...I can hear you asking yourselves. Well, I found this interview really applicable to what I think I see going on in "social business" trends, and the frequent reluctance of "mainstream" businesses to really commit their business strategies to sustainable, social-value-creating practices.
In this interview Irving (I will call him that, because I refuse to type and re-type Wladawsky) talks about the rise and spread of the internet over the past decade, and he says:
We were very, very excited but I don't think we knew how big it was going to be. People were saying in 1997 that if you were an existing business, you were toast, and that the internet was reinventing all the rules of business, and only those businesses born to the web were going to make it because they had a special sensibility - where they realised it was only about eyeballs, it had nothing to do with revenue and profit and cash. We were maybe among the most aggressive saying No, no, no: anybody can leverage the internet for business value. And of course that's what turned out, that the internet became a major part of every business.
I guess I don't have too much to add to that, except that I think it is a really useful reminder to all those - leaders of businesses, politicians, shareholders, women-on-the-street - who think that today, and here is how things are always going to be. We forget so quickly that things have been different before, have been turned on their heads before, have seemed like the end of the world before.
Just think about this - the 1997 conventional wisdom about the internet was "if you were an existing business, you were toast."
I work with private-sector businesses that are inherently "social" - kind of like those "special sensibility" internet-born companies old Irv mentions above. I think in the case of the internet and the world we are in today, those "special sensibility" companies are essential to prove ground, test models and ideas, highlight areas of value-creation and value-destruction... That's why I am in business, to help these pioneers prove that social value-creation can be leveraged for business value - and that it should become a major part of every smart business.
There is another important lesson here: those who half-assed it - the ones who took a wait-and-see, lukewarm, we'll-try-it-but-we-won't-commit approach to the internet - didn't do so hot. If the world starts shifting and you try to straddle the fault line, you're soon going to end up in a pretty uncomfortable position.
I was talking with a social entrepreneur the other day - someone who has found quite a bit of success in the UK with fair trade products - who echoed some things that I have heard from other people who I would call "social entrepreneur purists". This person said that she found it difficult to trust companies that were publicly owned or entrepreneur owned but ostensibly working toward a double/triple bottom line. She felt that one could never be too sure that the social wasn't being sacrificed for the financial, or just used for window dressing. I hear this from a lot of people - people who, with honourable intentions - believe that social entrepeneurship is best left to the social entrepreneurs, and that mainstream businesses will only corrupt and subvert it. To me, that sounds a lot like leaving the internet to the IT geeks. Not only is it short-sighted, but there is no way to stop the spread of something that can be found to build a better business. I admire the purists' intentions, but I feel their approach is a luxury that we don't have time to afford. It's time to figure out the best way for everyone to play in this field, because they are going to anyway.
So here's my hope: That the business world will not fail to recognise this old story, just because it happens to be dressed up in "social" clothing instead of fancy IT duds. Because soon, just as in the 1997-and-after world, it will be time for the old school companies to step in and play, without looking back.
What on earth has this got to do with anything?...I can hear you asking yourselves. Well, I found this interview really applicable to what I think I see going on in "social business" trends, and the frequent reluctance of "mainstream" businesses to really commit their business strategies to sustainable, social-value-creating practices.
In this interview Irving (I will call him that, because I refuse to type and re-type Wladawsky) talks about the rise and spread of the internet over the past decade, and he says:
We were very, very excited but I don't think we knew how big it was going to be. People were saying in 1997 that if you were an existing business, you were toast, and that the internet was reinventing all the rules of business, and only those businesses born to the web were going to make it because they had a special sensibility - where they realised it was only about eyeballs, it had nothing to do with revenue and profit and cash. We were maybe among the most aggressive saying No, no, no: anybody can leverage the internet for business value. And of course that's what turned out, that the internet became a major part of every business.
I guess I don't have too much to add to that, except that I think it is a really useful reminder to all those - leaders of businesses, politicians, shareholders, women-on-the-street - who think that today, and here is how things are always going to be. We forget so quickly that things have been different before, have been turned on their heads before, have seemed like the end of the world before.
Just think about this - the 1997 conventional wisdom about the internet was "if you were an existing business, you were toast."
I work with private-sector businesses that are inherently "social" - kind of like those "special sensibility" internet-born companies old Irv mentions above. I think in the case of the internet and the world we are in today, those "special sensibility" companies are essential to prove ground, test models and ideas, highlight areas of value-creation and value-destruction... That's why I am in business, to help these pioneers prove that social value-creation can be leveraged for business value - and that it should become a major part of every smart business.
There is another important lesson here: those who half-assed it - the ones who took a wait-and-see, lukewarm, we'll-try-it-but-we-won't-commit approach to the internet - didn't do so hot. If the world starts shifting and you try to straddle the fault line, you're soon going to end up in a pretty uncomfortable position.
I was talking with a social entrepreneur the other day - someone who has found quite a bit of success in the UK with fair trade products - who echoed some things that I have heard from other people who I would call "social entrepreneur purists". This person said that she found it difficult to trust companies that were publicly owned or entrepreneur owned but ostensibly working toward a double/triple bottom line. She felt that one could never be too sure that the social wasn't being sacrificed for the financial, or just used for window dressing. I hear this from a lot of people - people who, with honourable intentions - believe that social entrepeneurship is best left to the social entrepreneurs, and that mainstream businesses will only corrupt and subvert it. To me, that sounds a lot like leaving the internet to the IT geeks. Not only is it short-sighted, but there is no way to stop the spread of something that can be found to build a better business. I admire the purists' intentions, but I feel their approach is a luxury that we don't have time to afford. It's time to figure out the best way for everyone to play in this field, because they are going to anyway.
So here's my hope: That the business world will not fail to recognise this old story, just because it happens to be dressed up in "social" clothing instead of fancy IT duds. Because soon, just as in the 1997-and-after world, it will be time for the old school companies to step in and play, without looking back.
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