The Times discusses green consumption in an article titled "Buying Into the Green Movement."

Sorry about the break! It's summer again... Happy last weekend of June, everyone.

Helsingin Sanomat reports of US electronics retailer Circuit City and their novel layoff strategy. The corporation laid off 8% of their higher/highest paid workers in March, telling them that they could reapply for their old jobs at a lower wage.

"This strategy strikes me as being quite cold," said Bernard Baumohl, executive director of The Economic Outlook Group. "I don't think it's in the best interest of Circuit City as a whole." (Yahoo! News, March 28, 2007)

"Available for a limited time only"... New York Times Magazine's special issue on ecological building design and living.

"Cleaning Up"

“Corporate social responsibility” often means leveraging the concern (or guilt) of the affluent on behalf of those less fortunate: Sell to first-world consumers and redistribute some of the profits to address third-world problems. But a case has been made for a different strategy that involves selling to the poor themselves. In a speech last month, for instance, Harish Manwani, the chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, pointed to his firm’s marketing Lifebuoy soap to India’s sprawling underclass as an example of its efforts to bring “social responsibility to the heart of our business.”

Hindustan Lever is a subsidiary of Unilever, the packaged-goods giant (it owns brands including Dove and Ben & Jerry’s) that was formed in 1929 by the merger of the British soap maker Lever Brothers and the Dutch food company Margarine Unie. Global brands seem like a recent phenomenon, but Lever was already operating around the world when Lifebuoy entered the Indian market more than a hundred years ago. Another thing that existed a hundred years ago and is still around today is a large number of preventable deaths.

In his speech, Manwani focused on deaths caused by diarrhea-related diseases (the World Health Organization estimates such illnesses kill 1.8 million people a year) and noted that better hand-washing habits — using soap — is one way to prevent their spread. For several years, the World Bank has been involved in initiatives with multinationals, including Unilever, to address the issue.

Hindustan Lever’s Lifebuoy campaign, however, is not philanthropy; it’s business. Throughout its long life, the antibacterial soap has been positioned as a health-and-wellness product: a 1902 ad in Harper’s promised “this wonderful cleanser and purifier” was “the enemy of dirt and disease.” That “core proposition” remains, says Punit Misra, the marketing manager who oversees Lifebuoy and other skin-cleansing brands for Hindustan Lever. Perhaps the most significant change to the product itself in recent years has been the introduction of smaller, and thus cheaper, bars: a half-size, 50-gram bar, for five rupees (about two ounces, for roughly 12 cents), was introduced in the early 1990s. (The small-package approach is now used by many companies in developing markets.) More recently, the packaging was made “more contemporary” by replacing the “strapping young man” on the package with an image of a couple and their children, Misra says.

And five years ago, the company introduced a campaign called Swasthya Chetna or “Glowing Health,” which, boiled down, argues that even clean-looking hands may carry dangerous germs, so use more soap. It began a concentrated effort to take this message into the tens of thousands of villages where the rural poor reside, often with little access to media. “Lifebuoy teams visit each village several times,” Manwani said in his speech, using “a glo-germ kit to show schoolchildren” that soap-washed hands are cleaner. Manwani says this program has reached “around 80 million rural folk” and added that “sales of Lifebuoy have risen sharply.” The small bar has become the brand’s top seller.

C. K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor (and Hindustan Lever board member), uses the India Lifebuoy story as a case study in his 2004 book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which argues that the profit motive can be a powerful force in addressing global poverty issues. Building a campaign around a well-known product like Lifebuoy can be effective precisely because even the world’s poorest citizens can be “brand conscious.” (Hindustan Lever’s Misra agrees, saying that such consumers will stick with a brand they trust, because “money means that much more to them.”)

Still, is this really the right place for the profit motive? Hindustan Lever’s position is that profitable responsibility is the point. “If it’s not really self-sustaining,” Misra says, “somewhere along the line it will drop off.” Prahalad makes similar points. “The question that comes up all the time is: These companies are pushing consumption, but what we need is livelihood improvement,” he told me in an interview. But preventing illness also means a family might avoid a potentially devastating loss of several days’ work. And ultimately, he says, campaigns like Lifebuoy’s Swasthya Chetna should be evaluated not ideologically but by their impact on the global poor. “The alternative,” he said, “is needless death.”

(The New York Times, June 10, 2007)

More Moore

Shopacalypse

Reverend Billy is the founder of the Church of Stop Shopping that preaches against "mindless consumerism." An article and a video about Rev. Billy from a recent episode of the Today Show is here. Billy is a performance artist who has staged corporate "exorcisms" on location at stores like Victoria's Secret and Starbucks.

Earlier this year, Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame produced a documentary about Reverend Billy; the film is called "What Would Jesus Buy?" Apparently the movie will come out in December this year. An interview with Mr Spurlock about WWJB can be found here. A quote from the Spurlock interview:

For the past two years I haven’t bought anyone in my family Christmas presents and I haven’t asked them to get me anything either. I’ve said, “I don’t need anything, I love you guys and the most important thing is for me to get to see you and spend time with you.” So we’ve been planning family vacations. Let’s spend our money on something that we will all enjoy, and be together. That’s what I encourage everyone to do. That’s the most valuable thing you can do-spend time together to talk and communicate and connect. We don’t connect with people at all anymore. How many times do you just send an email to somebody without getting on the phone or send a text message? It’s the world we live in. We continue to get further and further away from real human contact. Especially for people that we love and care about, we can’t let that happen. So for me, that’s the one thing that I’ve really tried to do since meeting Billy.

Somewhere along the line we bought into this whole idea that if you don’t buy a lot of stuff or if you don’t buy a lot of things then you are cheap and you don’t love someone or that they are not as valuable. I think we need to remold that.

From CSR Wire:

Nike Sets Business Targets To Achieve Ambitious Corporate Responsibility Goals

Company more deeply integrates corporate responsibility into long-term growth and innovation business strategies

(CSRwire) BEAVERTON, OR - May 31, 2007 - With the release of its fiscal 2005 and 2006 Corporate Responsibility Report today, NIKE, Inc. announces a series of business targets for 2011 that more deeply integrate corporate responsibility goals into the company's long-term growth and innovation business strategies. The targets set benchmarks to improve labor conditions in contract factories, create a climate neutral company, drive sustainable product design and innovation, and unleash potential by giving youth greater access to the benefits of sport."We see corporate responsibility as a catalyst for growth and innovation" said Mark Parker, Nike, Inc.'s President and CEO. "It is an integral part of how we can use the power of our brand, the energy and passion of our people, and the scale of our business to create meaningful change." The corporate responsibility business targets set by Nike include:

Improve labor conditions by eliminating excessive overtime in Nike brand contract factories by 2011. Excessive overtime is one of the most serious ongoing labor compliance issues the company and the industry face. Nike's priority continues to be improving conditions for the almost 800,000 contract factory workers who make the company's products.

Make all Nike brand facilities, retail and business travel climate neutral by 2011. Nike has exceeded its reduction targets for CO2 emissions over the last two years through the World Wildlife Fund's Climate Savers program. The company also eliminated fluorinated gases (F-gases) across all Nike brand products following 14 years of research and development in the company’s Nike Air cushioning system.

Design all Nike brand footwear (more than 225 million pairs per year) to meet baseline targets by 2011 for waste reduction in product design and packaging, elimination of volatile organic compounds and increased use of environmentally preferred materials. All Nike brand apparel is targeted to meet baseline standards by 2015, and equipment by 2020. Nike is designing sustainable innovation solutions into its products that the company anticipates will create benefits throughout its supply chain and support achievement of its targets.

Invest in community-based initiatives that use the power of sport to unleash potential and improve the lives of youth. Over the past two years, Nike has invested $100 million in community-based sport initiatives. The company is targeting a minimum investment of $315 million through 2011.In addition to setting business targets, Nike continues its commitment to supply chain transparency by updating public disclosure of the more than 700 contract factories worldwide producing Nike product.

In 2005, Nike was the first company in its industry to disclose its factory base to encourage industry transparency and collaboration. For the first time, Nike also has posted on nikeresponsibility.com the company's contract factory auditing tools. The tools help to provide further transparency and insight into how the company evaluates and monitors its contract factories for compliance with company standards.

Well, what do you think? Ambitions and interesting - or overly positive greenwashing? I have to admit that I am impressed by Nike's committment to sustainability, who had guessed? I guess this counts to the the positives of a strong global brand - you can not afford another sweatshop / environmental scandal... a ruined reputation would cost too much. But... would this pressure count for private labels?