M&S set a sustainable benchmark for the retail world

Jonathon Porritt, March 11th 2010, Business, Forum founders, Retail

I spoke at the annual M&S Suppliers’ Conference on Tuesday, which took place in Kensington Town Hall. This venue has a particular resonance for me as it was where the votes for the 1979 and 1984 European elections were counted – and every time I’m back there, I can’t help but recall that sense of consternation that so few people seemed to be prepared, at that time, to put their cross in the Green Party box!

Twenty-six years on and it seemed as if the M&S Suppliers were all voting enthusiastically for the updated version of Plan A! And that was not just because Sir Stuart Rose made a very powerful pitch telling them all that this was their reality whether they liked it or not. By the end of the day, they would certainly have had an unnerving sense of bars being raised all around them, in terms of production standards, transparency, reporting, innovation and so on.

Plan A was launched three years ago, and instantly captured people’s imagination. The combination of carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill pledges, the 100 Action Points, the commitment to invest £200 million, and the sense of all this being at the core of the company rather than being grafted on made an immediate impact. It also gave Plan A the kind of brand profile that took it way beyond the usual corporate responsibility strategies.

Three years on, the £200 million cost has been turned into a £50 million contribution to profit. Forty-five of the Action Points have been delivered, and another 80 have been added on. The ambition level has been ratcheted up several notches, with M&S now committing to becoming the world’s most sustainable (major) retailer by 2015.

Forum for the Future has worked closely with M&S throughout this time, so we are not exactly disinterested parties, but Plan A does provide the benchmark for the whole of the retail world. It’s visionary, it’s applied, it’s comprehensive (as in covering all the sustainability bases), and it’s succeeding in getting whole-company buy-in, through the high level  “How We Do Business” Committee, chaired (and driven!) by Sir Stuart Rose.

So it’s well worthwhile checking out the new version of Plan A, available at: http://plana.marksandspencer.com/media/pdf/planA-2010.pdf

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Fashion's sustainable future brought to life in new Forum project

Fiona Bennie, February 24th 2010, Futures, Retail

Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So how can an industry become sustainable when the ‘we loved it, but now we shun it’ cycle is embedded so deeply? Do we have to change everything we love about fashion to make it a sustainable, fair industry? Not necessarily.

Last night, amid the glamour and excitement of London Fashion Week, we held a drinks party with Levi Strauss & Co., to launch our joint report Fashion Futures which explores the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry within it. More than a hundred fashion industry folk turned up to hear about our four vivid scenarios and view the animations, which bring them to life.

Follow this link to find out what kind of worlds might see cities inundated by second-hand department stores; high-street brands competing on sustainability credentials; people partying in biodegradable, spray-on outfits; and regions where grow-your-own clothing is popular.

We created the scenarios to help companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable businesses. They compel us to mull over big questions we wouldn’t usually consider when thinking short-term. Like how the industry will react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials – or how people will care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices – which raises deeper questions like whether current business models will survive in a retail market that’s very different from today.

We have deliberately avoided making Fashion Futures a read-it-then-shelve-it report. We want companies of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the globe, to use the four scenarios. We want them to be inspired, perhaps even a little scared by some of them, but hopefully motivated to think differently about the future and excited by the idea that a sustainable fashion industry is achievable.

To this end, we’ve published some workshop materials on our website with advice on how to use the scenarios to shape strategy, push for sustainable design and innovation and generate the skills needed for a sustainable industry.

And we’ve brought the scenarios to life with four powerful two-minute animations, which show just how different they are, and how much a sustainable future depends on us taking bold action today.

Fashion Futures has already been put to practical use. Our project partner, Levi Strauss & Co. is using the scenarios internally, to inform strategy and innovation. As Michael Kobori (pictured), LS&Co’s Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability said at the launch party yesterday, "These scenarios are so stimulating, we will be sharing them with senior management to inform our broad strategies, with designers to spur them to create more sustainable products, and with all employees to unleash the power of our entire company to think about sustainability."

And we’ve used them to help fashion students understand how to design for the future, working with the great team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. Four groups of students from the 2009-10 MA Fashion and the Environment – a diverse and enthusiastic bunch from all over the world - spent their autumn term living and breathing one of the Fashion Futures scenarios, creating new ideas and businesses that would thrive in such a world. They not only produced some great, thought-provoking concepts, which are illustrated in our report, but they also helped us shape the scenarios at one of the critical stages of development.

So this is the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re looking forward to helping our partners and others use the scenarios and we’re excited to hear how other organisations will use them in innovative ways.

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Unleashing brands as agents of transformative change

Sally Uren, February 1st 2010, Business, Innovation, Retail

Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.

A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.

Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low.  So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.

But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands.  Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level.  The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).

And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent.  We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon.  In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.  

So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life? 

At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered.  He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’.  Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.

Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits.  It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour. 
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple.  It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.

Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications.  Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.

Two final tips for effective consumer communications.  The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster.  Make people feel good.  Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change.  You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.
 
Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers.  Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.

We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing.  But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff.  Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.

For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward -  we simply need to consume less stuff.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

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Time for a retail revolution

Dan Crossley, October 28th 2009, Climate change, General, Leadership, Retail

When you see the chief executives of five world-famous companies debating how to make the broader retail sector more sustainable, you realise a quiet revolution is underway.

The senior figures in question were the bosses of Tesco, Coca Cola, Unilever, SC Johnson and Reckitt Benckiser, responsible for combined sales of well in excess of £100 billion. The stage was the Sustainable Consumption Institute event –‘Consumers: the key to a low carbon world’ – held at the Royal Society in London this month.

These leaders acknowledged the major role their companies can play in helping their customers to lead more sustainable lives. They also talked about their responsibility to lead and to educate consumers – quite a change from the “we only do what consumers tell us” rhetoric that we might have heard in the past.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s chief executive, used the event to announce bold new climate change ambitions for the world’s third largest retailer.

Three commitments particularly caught my eye.

Firstly, Tesco will become a zero carbon business by 2050 (at the latest) – an aspiration that we would encourage others to strive for (obviously the earlier the better).

Secondly, it will reduce the carbon impact of the products in its supply chain by 30% by 2020 – meaning it will have to collaborate much more closely with key suppliers.

And thirdly, the retailer will work with consumers to help them move towards zero carbon homes – a big potential prize.

We have to rewind to early 2007 to see Tesco’s first big announcements on climate change – at the ‘Green Grocer’ event, hosted by Forum for the Future. It was there that Sir Terry first talked about the need for a new revolution in green consumption and pledged to set up the Sustainable Consumption Institute.

It was one of a flurry of bold retailer announcements on sustainability at the time, including Marks & Spencer’s Plan A and Wal-Mart’s Sustainability 360.

Since then many of our leading retailers, including Tesco, have taken some fantastic steps, particularly on climate change. In the grand scheme of things though, it’s been more of a rumble, than the revolution we really need.

Sir Terry reiterated the rationale for a revolution in green consumption at the recent event: “For Tesco [it]… is a fantastic opportunity: once and for all to break the link between consumption and emissions, and in doing so to satisfy a new consumer need, and grow our business.”

Tesco deserves praise for raising the bar, as the need for action is growing ever more urgent. That’s why we’ll be pushing our retail and branded manufacturing partners hard next year on enabling, informing and encouraging consumers to make sustainable purchasing decisions. We need more bold ambitions and – critically - we need to see them realised, in order to achieve a real green retail revolution.

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Confident retailers take the lead on sustainability

Shannon Carr-Shand, September 21st 2009, Retail

This year we interviewed the great and the good of European retail to find out how they are tackling sustainablity. We were delighted to find a growing group with the confidence to demand high standards from their suppliers and to influence their customers’ behaviour.

Sustainability is high on the agenda for retailers across Europe, but their approach is determined by two important factors – their specific business environment and their perception of their power in the marketplace. The sector divides itself into contributors and leaders, depending on retailers’ confidence in their ability to influence consumers and suppliers

Leaders are more likely to impose strict sustainability criteria on their supply chains and consider the indirect, as well as the direct, impacts of their services. They are also more willing to take the lead with their consumers, supplying more sustainable products.

Contributors concentrate on managing down their direct environmental footprint and on working with own-label products to reduce impacts. They provide consumers with as much choice as possible, providing information on sustainability issues, rather than rationalising their product lines.

The findings are detailed in our report, Sustainability Trends in European Retail, sponsored by Coca-Cola Enterprises, which looks at the key trends influencing how retailers address sustainability and their ambitions on delivering sustainable consumption.

Overall, sustainability is high on the agenda for retailers across Europe – no surprise there. And whilst ambition and speed of progress may vary across the retail sector, there is little significant difference in the actual issues retailers focus on. Much work has been done in recent years by retailers on recycling and reducing packaging, and the carbon footprint of businesses is now fast becoming the headline priority for the sector.

But the key to delivering sustainable consumption lies in unlocking what sustainable value means for customers – not just in terms of price, but also quality and a wide range of other characteristics.  Without consumers demanding sustainable options and rewarding retailers and manufacturers who can offer that sustainable option at a fair price, change will happen very slowly.

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A green bounce as we come out of the red?

Dan Crossley, July 9th 2009, Retail

Imagine a world where sustainable living is fashionable, friendly and fun. One where consumers are engaged and excited, and ‘green’ has become cool.
 
That’s where we need to get to and fast, argued our expert set of panelists at our recent ‘ahead of the agenda’ seminar on “Greening the post-crunch consumer” Andy Hobsbawm from award-winning public service Green Thing (Dothegreenthing.com); Jessica Sansom from Innocent Drinks; David North from Tesco; and Joel Levy from PSB, the marketing research and consulting firm.
 
The consensus was that we are undoubtedly seeing some more sustainable behaviours during the downturn, ranging from increases in ‘grow your own’ to a rise in holidaying in the UK, and from cutting down on food waste to attending swishing parties to exchange second-hand clothes.

But, how can we optimise the green bounce when we come out of the recession and avoid a rebound away from the more sustainable behaviours the downturn has encouraged?
 
Joel Levy presented recent PSB research findings to demonstrate that post-crunch consumers are likely to be greener as a result of the strong momentum which has built up and the growing recognition of the value of linking carbon savings with cost savings.

David North acknowledged the many challenges that lie ahead, but outlined practical steps retailers can take to help mainstream green consumption. Tesco provides incentives to customers through initiatives like Green Clubcard, as well as tackling its own direct impacts - it plans to open the world's first zero-carbon food store later this year.

Jessica Sansom from Innocent Drinks stressed the importance of getting the consumer engaged and excited on sustainability.

And finally Andy Hobsbawm argued that we need to take the same amount of resource that has been used to ‘cast spells’ on unsustainable behaviour (i.e. through marketing and advertising) to cast alternative spells - on more sustainable behaviours, products and services.

The take-home message from the seminar is that post-crunch consumers could behave more sustainably - if the right support mechanisms are in place. So, let's do it - a fashionable, friendly and fun world sounds cool to me.
 
 See our summary of the evening for further details.

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Could global brands save the world?

Sally Uren, May 19th 2009, Business, Retail

Could global brands be the key to a sustainable, low-carbon world? Quite possibly.

Whilst it’s often all to easy to engage in a bit of big business bashing and dismiss corporate efforts on sustainability, the fact is that right now, major companies and their brands are in a better position to lead the charge towards a low-carbon world than any government.

This is particularly true in the UK, where levels of consumer trust in politicians is at an all-time low following a string of revelations that elected members of parliament have used taxpayer’s money to clean moats, mend tennis courts and buy nappies (amongst other random goods).

I’m not the only one who thinks global brands are becoming agents for transformational change. At a recent seminar the Forum held jointly with the marketing agency Dragon Rouge, which set out to examine the synergies between marketing and sustainability, Santiago Gowland, VP- Unilever Brand and Corporate Responsibility, said that by acting as a bridge between corporate strategy and consumer behaviour, global brands can deliver long lasting, positive change.

I completely agree with Santiago and would go even further, and argue that big brands and marketing could hold the key to a low-carbon, more sustainable world.  This is because marketing drives product development, marketing drives consumer behaviour and marketing can make almost anything desirable.  

Marketing creates consumer pull – we didn’t particularly ask for cameras in our mobile phones – but now we all have them. The mainstream consumer isn’t demanding (yet) a low carbon world. Can marketing create the consumer pull that saves the day?

As long ago as 2003, Forum for the Future was trying to engage the marketing community in the challenge and opportunity that is sustainable development. We had two notable successes in the shape of Unilever and Centrica, but on the whole we failed to engage marketing directors with our idea. (We called it Limited Edition, which in hindsight, may have been completely the wrong name).

Limited Edition remained very limited for three big reasons: back in 2003 the term ‘sustainable consumption’ had absolutely no traction and was seen as the anathema of economic growth; sustainability was seen as the opposite of desirable (and reserved solely for sandal-wearing deep greens – we were a long way from eco-chic); and finally, green purchasing was still the hunting ground of a few global green watchdogs.

But 2009 is a different story. We have carbon labels on everyday goods, we have seen the rise of the ‘make it easy for me to be green’ consumer, and we also know that there are hard limits to traditional business models that rely on unlimited access to resources, be these of the natural or credit variety.

This all means that right now we have an amazing opportunity to unleash marketing in the pursuit of sustainable consumption. The sustainable choice needs to be the easy choice, with sustainability credentials mainstreamed into everyday products and services.

In order to try and seize this opportunity, on June 16th we're launching the Sustainable Brand Leadership Group, a new initiative hosted by the Forum and developed by a group of marketing professionals. The idea is to convene a group of leading consumer-facing brands, who commission a team of planners to unearth the best practice on behaviour change, and develop propositions for sustainable lifestyles. Ultimately, our aim is to use the project as a platform for collaboration between the participating brands for innovation of new products and services for sustainable lifestyles.

I really believe that marketing could help redefine our notion of value and desirability.  Value has to be more than price – among other things it should also be about product origin and efficiency of use. By making the old and slightly battered as desirable as the shiny and new, marketing could help move us away from our current throwaway culture.

Ultimately, marketing, through everyday brands that touch most of us, has a critical role in helping us consume more sustainably. In the short term, clever marketing could help embed the current recessionary, more sustainable behaviours. Marketing could help us love our leftovers and our allotments forever. 

In the long term, by connecting the consumer with the sustainability and climate change agenda, marketing could drive the development of lower carbon goods and services, helping everyone consume differently, and hopefully, more sustainably.

So, all you marketing geniuses out there – are you ready?

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Credit crunch means the future's come early

Hannah Bullock, May 18th 2009, Retail

Anyone who’s watched Sex in the City will know that ladies have been able to rent a Louise Vuitton handbag for a night for a good while now. And that Oscar darlings have been glamming themselves up with hired out bling and ballgowns for years. But did you know people are doing the same with real things (you know, stuff you really need – like cameras and sewing machines) in real places?

A handful of websites are emerging out of the recession as serious contenders to eBay, suggesting that you don’t need to bid – and pay – for all those gizmos that just sit in the cupboard for most of the year, when it’s easier to borrow something from someone in the neighbourhood.

I’m all for it. I don’t think many people get that excited about actually owning a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. They just have to use them now and again. That's the thing: floor sanders, sewing machines, lawn scarifiers only come out when they have to. One study – or perhaps it’s an urban myth – says that the average power drill is used for only seven minutes over its lifetime, so imagine the extra use that could be got out of all those very specialised things stored under the stairs if they were rented out online.

Has the credit crunch helped the future come early? Forum for the Future talked about a similar service when we drew up our visions of the future in Low Carbon Living 2022. Just like the ‘Locality’ website they forecast back in 2007, newcomer www.zilok.co.uk touts itself as a moneymaking exercise, inviting users to take a virtual tour of their house, ticking the objects they own, to get a calculation of monthly earnings if they rented them on the web.

www.erento.co.uk is the other one I’ve come across, where you can get anything from log splitters to gold rings. Even Hummers are posted up there – I suppose if one of those giants can satisfy several drivers over its lifetime, rather than being scrapped, so much the better.

I was disappointed not to see any wedding dresses on there though – I think we can say we’re really making progress when it’s okay for a woman to walk up the aisle in a dress that may be white, but isn’t virgin.

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Car parks and climate change

Dan Crossley, May 15th 2009, Retail

What’s the connection between car parks and climate change? Each year shoppers in the UK drive a combined nine billion kilometres to stores to do their food shopping, generating around three million tonnes of CO2.

To put it in context, that’s the equivalent of the carbon footprint of the entire country of Nepal.

Why oh why then do we have so many huge supermarket car parks? On the face of it, the logic for retailers is pretty clear. They think customers need a car parked close by so they can take away as much shopping as possible.

And this appears to be borne out by the numbers. Drivers take away an estimated five-and-a-half times more products than non-drivers. A survey from a couple of years ago showed that 86% of those who have shopping responsibility (and who drive) usually take a car to the supermarket to do their weekly shop. So car parks are arguably one of the things that enable the "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap and drive 'em home" supermarket model to function.

It’s not the humble car park’s fault on its own, I accept. But surely this is a self-fulfilling prophecy? People are encouraged to drive to store because there is somewhere convenient to park. And parking spaces are provided because people are driving there.

If you look at it from a different perspective – quite literally - from the air, then car parks seem less logical. They are often bigger than the retail outlets themselves – surely not the most economically efficient use of the retailer’s land? There must be a financial case for retailers to sell off part of that (often very valuable) land, or simply for them to share use during non-busy times.

I’m not suggesting that retailers get rid of all their car parks – that’s not realistic. But I do believe that they can reduce the number of customer trips (and hence the number of parking spaces required) without reducing their overall customer base.

What does that mean in practice? Simple – retailers should follow our standard travel hierarchy.

Enable shoppers to avoid the journey to store, e.g. by making online shopping easier and more attractive, as Waitrose did recently by scrapping their delivery charge for online grocery shopping.

Encourage drivers to reduce the total number of journeys, e.g. by combining shopping trips.

And help customers switch to lower-carbon alternative travel options, e.g. work with local authorities to make sure stores are served by public transport networks and, in the longer-term, give customers incentives to use electric or hybrid cars.

More fundamentally, retailers should strive to reduce the packaging and weight of the products they sell (e.g. by using concentrates). Of the many benefits this would have, one would be to make people’s shopping bags smaller, thus enabling them to be carried on public transport more easily.

So, my take-home message to retailers: let’s find creative ways of providing low-carbon customer access to your products and services, and let’s give the car parking space the opportunity of a change of career.

This ‘driving to store’ blog is the first in a series about notable but neglected retail impacts.

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How to make a better world, fashionably

Vicky Murray, February 27th 2009, Retail

I heard a fact last night that warmed the cockles of my heart.  According to Emma Freud from Comic Relief – speaking at a fundraising event run by TK Maxx – despite these credit crunch times, as a nation we’re reaching deeper into our pockets.  This year’s Comic Relief looks set to be the best yet.

This got me thinking… is this recession-busting generosity translating into more ethical purchasing too?  After all, whilst donating to charity is certainly worthwhile, making sure our everyday purchases are more sustainable could potentially do more to alleviate poverty across the globe, by ensuring that the people who make our products are paid a fair wage for doing so.

Recent research from War on Want showed that in 2008 garment workers producing clothes for our UK highstreets were not being paid enough to live on.  The workers they interviewed in Bangladesh were being paid between £13.97 to £24.37 per month.  The average (£19.16) was less than half the ‘living wage’ calculated for a Bangladeshi garment worker with a family (£44.82). With this in mind I found it pertinent that London Fashion Week coincided with Fairtrade Fortnight this year.

The good news is that it looks as though the clothing industry is beginning to take action.  Defra launched the industry’s Sustainable clothing action plan last week after more than year of consultation. Companies such as M&S, Tesco and Nike have all committed to specific actions.

Tesco, for example, has made 15 separate commitments ranging from using sustainable and recycled materials to developing Green Factory guidelines, and reportedly stocked up on ethical clothing supplies at Estethica – London Fashion Week’s sustainable fashion section, where the Action Plan was launched.

So to bring this back to my original question, does this mean we’re shopping more ethically despite the recession?  Well, it’s a fairly safe bet that at least part of the reason retailers are taking action is because they think there’s a market for more sustainable clothing.

To move things on a step further and create the biggest impact, the larger retailers should learn from the pioneers, like Howies and People Tree, who scrutinise their supply chains to make sure that all their clothing (not just Fair Trade or Organic ranges) is made in a way that benefits people and planet.

If they did, shopping for the clothes we need could potentially give us the same warm fuzzy feeling as donating to fabulous causes like Comic Relief.  Now there’s a happy thought for any fashionista!

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