Tag Archives: corporations

Sustainable supply chain: how to build it?

At the beginning of March 2011, McDonald’s announced its Sustainable Land Management Commitment (SLMC), a long-term plan to ensure the corporation only serves food (and uses packaging) certified as sustainably sourced. The initial focus is on five high impact products: beef, poultry, coffee, palm oil and packaging.  McDonald’s certainly have all the power to be able to win negotiations with suppliers and reach its goals, but what about small retailers who are buying from overseas?

Shirahime, a UK based ethical fashion consultancy, has published a guide to responsibly sourcing textiles and clothes from India.

Despite its narrow country and industry focus, the guide is packed with advice for any business looking to find responsible goods or services suppliers from overseas. Here’s an excerpt of the Shiraname’s guide.

Be clear about the outcomes you want to achieve
Define aims clearly and build a strategy around the outcomes you want to achieve. Don’t look exclusively for suppliers who have certification. Certification is a costly process and may not guarantee the specific outcomes youwant.

Instead, visit potential suppliers and examine their operations for yourself. If you do this, make sure you have a suitable translator and cultural liaison who can guide your decision making process. In addition, start networking, even if it’s with your competitors. If you do this up front it can vastly increase your chances of success in finding the right supplier.

Consider company size alongside business practices
There can be a correlation between a supplier’s size, the goods or services it provides, and its ability to operate responsibly.

As a broad rule of thumb, the larger the company the more comprehensive their offering will be. Yet the larger the company, the more likely it is that their business is focussed upon financial efficiency, not responsible practice. Therefore, if you’re looking for a responsible supplier it may be worth choosing smaller producers rather than bulk providers as your partners.

Consider alternatives to your preferred goods, service or country
In order to get the most responsible procurement deal, businesses have to change their mindset and be open minded about both the country of origin and the goods or service they’re looking to procure.

Be prepared to invest as well as purchase
Businesses need to think about how they can contribute long term value to their suppliers’ enterprise beyond a simple commercial deal. This is where the value of being clear in your outcomes and partnering with other companies can yield substantial benefits. (Source: Guardian.co.uk)

GoodGuide for Good Products for a more sustainable Retail

Yesterday I was reading a post concerning Levi Strauss & Co as the Top Jeans Brand, scoring a 7.4. The brand Prana was listed as the next highest, with a score of 6.3—followed by H&M (6.1), Banana Republic (6.1), and Old Navy (6.1).

I did not know what GoodGuide is – shame on me – so I checked out their very interesting website, which is said to be the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social impacts of consumer products. And I think it really is, rating over 95000 products, mainly available on the US market only: from food, toys, personal care to apparel, electronics and appliances. What is really striking is the scientific approach they have on their ratings, which are compiled from three sub-scores addressing Health, Environment and Society.


 Each of these sub-scores are based on an analysis of a set of indicators that GoodGuide has determined are the best-available measures of performance in these areas. Their methodology differs from the product belonging to different categories, each and every one having its own scoring methodology. Amazing. Let’s talk about apparel for example.

Quoting the Good Guide site: “Until (apparel) companies do a better job of providing transparency into their supply chain, our ability to accurately score brands based on their relative performance will be subject to significant uncertainties Environment scores are assigned to apparel brands by combining GoodGuide’s standard company indicators of environmental performance (weighted at 50%) with brand-level environmental indicators that address issues that are specific to the apparel sector (weighted at 50%).(….) Social scores are assigned to apparel brands by combining GoodGuide’s standard company indicators of social performance (50%) with brand-level social indicators that address issues that are specific to the apparel sector (weighted at 50%).(…) Health scores are not assigned to apparel brands because this product category does not generally pose health risks to consumers.”

The Good Guide website is also very good at using the Web 2.0 tools to “spread the word” and improve the accuracy of the product information thanks to a “support product info” page which enables visitors to add further details.

It would be also very interesting to test the effect of this kind of structured and scientific information directly at the point-of-sale, to see how the consumer react when discovering that his/her favourite brand of pasta is not that “good”. Because thanks to GoodGuide mobile App this is possible: consumers can scan the product, check the GoodGuide database and then purchase, or decide to choose another brand.

With this detailed level of “scientific” information, producers and retailers have nothing to hide and their achieving a high/low score can have a boomerang effect on brand reputation which must not be ignored and will not be ignored by consumers. Sustainability pays, and it will pay even more in the future.

Two social media tools for retailers: local buzzing with enterprise control.

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We often talk about social media, buzz marketing and online reputation. Big corporations can find it quite difficult to control and “direct” all the related online communication, especially when this is done at local level – agents, retailers, franchises. But now there are platforms that can help corporations achieve great results with just a couple of clicks.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting Tweet by Mashable, regarding a new startup, Hearsay, whose product – Hearsay Social- is a social media management platform, that gives companies with a national presence and local agents or franchises the ability to manage all of their social media in one place. Hearsay calls organizations that fit this mold “corporate/local.” Hersay Social is a web-based software that a corporation and its local branches can use to coordinate their social media efforts. The dashboard gives local agents or franchises the ability to manage their own local Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It also also gives corporations the ability to monitor local engagement. Not only can they access detailed analytics for all of their agents, they can also catch when they step out of line. Hearsay clients list includes State Farms whose case study is availaible online.  Here’s an interesting video about the product features.

Another software that can help companies achieve the same result: Expion. Expion provides Social Media Management Software that enables large Enterprises to publish and aggregate social media conversations that can scale to hundreds of local based Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels, etc. This software allows maximum employee social reach within a company’s defined social guardrails, allows for employees across all your locations or departments to deliver coordinated and consistent brand appropriate messaging. At the same time Expion’s unified database aggregates and tracks all employee and customer social interactions. This centralized intelligence will profile customers, identify advocates and critics, track behaviors and create best employee practices, while measuring effectiveness of messaging for continued optimization. Expion is already used by Coldwell Banker Advantage, Applebees’s Restaurants and Mark’s among the many

When Zero is a great result

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I  suggest to everybody interested in what big corporations are doing about sustainability to download the State of Green Business report by Greenbiz.com available online.

For those of you who have little time and want to hear the good news first: many big coCourtesy of Naem.orgrporations, from Xerox to Kraft, from Procter and Gamble to Coca-Cola, are working hard at reducing if not eliminating the waste originated by the manufacturing process. Companies learnt that cutting waste can yield multiple savings, together with a better image and a greener environment.

But -here's the bad news – there is no generally accepted definition of what "zero waste" means. For some companies zero waste might include also incinerations and other technologies that many "green professionals" will not define as sustainable and eco-friendly ones.

As we always stress, a standardization of sustainability practices is a need for a better and more efficient communication with consumers and with stakeholders, so that to avoid a word that we don't like at all: greenwashing.(Photo courtesy of naem.org)

Does sustainability pays? Yes

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Whenever I talk with a client about sustainability, a question arises “Does sustainability pay?”. The answer is with no doubt YES! There are researches available online showing that when customers are offered a choice, they do prefer eco-friendly products and “punish” not so sustainable brands asking a much lower price. Obviously, what companies willing to invest in sustainability must understand is that a sustainable strategy goes hand in hand with a communication strategy – otherwise consumers will not perceive the added value during the purchasing process.

A recent survey conducted by the Uk consumer organisation “Which?” showed that between 74% and 96% of the people surveyed were unaware of the big names behind 10 popular ethical brands. And, once they found out, of those whose opinion changed, more had a negative reaction than a positive one. “Consumers are being misled,” said one respondent while another commented: “I feel conned.” One reason behind this negative reaction is that interviewed were worried about large companies being more concerned with profits than ethics.

What manufacturers must really understand is that consumers are willing to buy sustainable products but at the same time are going to punish any non-ethical behaviour by asking for a very reduced price. The future of retail and of sustainability lies in the ability of producers to understand this and to act accordingly.