BUSINESS MONITOR
It’s all about doing the right thing
Are you a lean, green, money machine or could you be doing a lot more to woo customers for whom ethical trading, corporate social responsibility and green credentials are a top priority? Paul Clapham reports
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ordon Gekko of Wall Street fame said ʻgreed is goodʼ. Nobody really bought it. What we actually want is decent behaviour from everybody we buy from.
The same applies to our customers: we want them to use our products and services in a virtuous way. Suppliers to the business doing make-overs for under 13s in ethics, sorry Essex, will probably be feeling a bit wobbly. They will feel wrong about it.
Every newspaper I pick up recently has comment on Fifa, Formula 1 and footballers and the word ʻethicsʼ turns up each time with ʻlack ofʼ attached. Letʼs not even mention investment bankers. The nation, indeed the world, is getting hacked off with bad commercial behaviour. But, hell, itʼs just business, isnʼt it? Let the buyer beware and all that. Well, actually, itʼs not so simple any more. The customer is increasingly aware of the wider issues of their purchasing. They want to know how many miles their food has travelled, they want to know whether child labour is involved, they donʼt want to buy something that has damaged the environment in its production. This attitude is growing. Ethical investment – for people who put their money where their environmentally conscious mouth is – happens to be one of the biggest growth areas in the sector. People are also spending money on electric cars, ground-source heating, solar panels and a raft of other virtuous products.
Consider what happens when the opposite applies. Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of the spectacularly collapsed Enron, is currently serving a 24 year sentence for fraud. Enron, please note, had a policy aimed at recruiting the best
| 22 | August 2011
and brightest from top business schools, so their meltdown had nothing to do with stupidity; everything to do with cupidity in the corporate ethos. In essence, Enron management spent huge time and money making the business look good to customers and even moreso to investors. Being good or doing good didnʼt come into the equation. Skilling may now regret that ethos.
This is about PR isnʼt it? If there was nobody like me, able to tell the world that a company was trampling all over customers and suppliers, whoʼd care? The answer is everybody – all those customers and suppliers to start with, the companyʼs staff to follow plus fans of any social website. This is a good thing. If you treat people like the proverbial, a bucketful of ditto will land on your head and it will be well merited.
Ethical policy
Those social websites are an important element of this. Good news and bad news alike can travel the world and fast. Doing a poor job for one person can reach not just the ten people he tells in the pub but millions. Therefore a carefully followed ethical policy can be a defence mechanism.
On the other hand, aim to be nice. Does that work? Vince Lombardi famously said ʻnice guys finish lastʼ; in American football it might have been true, but itʼs not even uniformly true for sport. Muttiah Muralitharan recently retired from international cricket with a record 800 test wickets. Teammates and opponents queued up to say that he was a great player but an even nicer person. Remember, he finished first. Yeah, but. The ʻbutʼ is you have to make a profit. Quite right. Me too. So do John Lewis Partnership and they do it very well. Last year they made £431 million
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profit on £8.2 billion sales. As youʼll be aware the staff are partners, so they are highly motivated but it goes far deeper. JLP regularly tops surveys for favoured and trusted brands, notably they topped the Verdict survey of retailers scoring a rating of over 90% satisfaction – the first time anyone had achieved that magic number. John Lewis is of course a very big company, but the basic principle applies to anyone: they have a principled approach which brings in customers and keeps them. Corporate social responsibility is hard-wired into the companyʼs DNA. Being a force for good in the local community has always been part of the JLP vision. Itʼs part of the reason that we believe the claim ʻnever knowingly undersoldʼ. We trust the company.
angible business opportunities might seem unlikely from this, but I think there are several routes. Firstly there are all those major corporations on the FTSE100 and FTSE250 making grandiose claims for their involvement in ethical trading. Somebody will have a remit to drive this forward in each case. Next, have a look at the Green Providers Directory. It is a veritable Aladdinʼs cave of suppliers of all manner of green products. Most of them are small, but they all have that ethical standpoint and a proportion of them will buy printwear to promote themselves. In which case they are highly likely to prefer to deal with a business as clean as they are themselves.
Consider some high-profile brands
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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