When M&S launched Plan A at the beginning of 2007, it cemented the company's commitment to ethical practices - and made sustainability an even more central part of its brand. Prior to that, M&S had already been engaging customers in ethical issues through its 'Look behind the label' campaign. This approach has been recognised as a huge success, and has contributed significantly to the revitalisation of the company.
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The ‘Look behind the label’ (LBTL) campaign, which was launched in January 2006, invites customers to look deeper into the M&S brand and products. It helps them to understand more about the way the company does things, and to appreciate how M&S ethical practices are different from those of its competitors. The campaign promotes transparency in key areas, such as salt content, fats, durability, recycling, sustainability, ‘washability’, free-range, non-GM and animal welfare – essentially the key areas that might be on customers’ radar.
Both in-store and on the company’s website, customers can get information on these topics and see how M&S principles are put into practice. Information on the web site includes ‘M&S only serves Fairtrade tea and coffee in their Café Revives’, ‘they only use free-range eggs in their products’ and they have ‘stringent standards to control the use of harmful chemicals and dyes in their clothing range’.
Seeing through the journey
Through the LBTL campaign, M&S talked about some of the ethical initiatives they had already achieved and the company saw the biggest ever uplift of trust in the M&S brand. This led the company on to develop Plan A, a five- year commitment to change 100 things within M&S that will make the company as sustainable as it can possibly be (called Plan A because there’s no Plan B).
M&S is going to invest £200 million over the next five years on executing Plan A, which will affect all aspects of the company. It seems like a huge investment, but Mike Barry, M&S’ head of corporate social responsibility, is convinced that it’s worth every penny. He says, “We know that’s what our customers want. Our decision to invest in Plan A is based on a mix of research and experience. We listen to our customers every year about what they expect from us. Back in 2003 about 50% of our customers said that M&S acting responsibly is an important part of why they shop with us, by 2005 that was 75% and by 2006 it was 97%!”
But, he continues, “What the challenge is, maybe for retailers in particular, is not so much knowing what customers expect of you, because all customers expect retailers to deal with social and environmental issues in some shape or form, it’s the breadth of what you are dealing with, and what our customers have been really clear about with us was that we mustn’t cherry-pick.”
Mike explains that the success of LBTL gave the company confidence to say, “OK good start”, but LBTL wasn’t aspirational since it talked about the past rather than the future, and in respect of the cherry-picking that customers didn’t like, it only talked about some very specific commitments. Therefore, M&S decided that Plan A should touch at least 100 different work-streams across the business. Mike says, “I think, within reason, that we haven’t missed anything out. We are doing all the things that are difficult and all the things that are deeply un-sexy as well as all the ones that capture the media attention here and now”. Mike adds, “Plan A should also be aspirational and talk about where the company is going in the future, just as much as it will talk about where it is right now. It should also talk about issues that any retailer would face, not just M&S”.
And Plan A has definitely had a warm welcome. “There has been a fantastic feedback from employees, customers and suppliers. Firstly there is a sense that yes, these challenges exist and society and businesses should address them and secondly, they would expect M&S to be at the forefront addressing them,” says Mike.
“You should never underestimate how significant customer and employee expectations are in this area. People don’t know the details and they don’t know what the all solutions are, but what they in fact say is that they expect M&S as a big British business to be out there trying to develop a solution and make it available for them.” Mike continues, “So, we didn’t launch Plan A lightly, we thought it through, we planned it, but still despite all that, the feedback has been even more positive than we expected. It’s like British society is reaching a tipping point in 2007, where there is a mass understanding that something needs to change but a massive confusion about what that change might involve and what has to be done.” Mike is convinced that within the next five to ten years every sizeable British company will have to make significant changes to how they do business in order to respond to these pressures from consumers and employees.The importance of being earnestly transparent
As sustainability becomes fashionable, and more and more companies make statements about how green they are, consumers will inevitably question the sincerity of some of these companies. There is no doubt in Mike’s mind that transparency is vehemently important in guarding against greenwash. “British consumers used to be very trusting, but all the food scares in the ‘90s made consumers very sceptical about what they were told and what to believe and now we retailers are challenged to ‘prove it’”. Mike adds, “And I think that one of the most significant parts of Plan A is to very publicly say what we have committed to doing and then very publicly report on how we are doing it, how we are progressing”.
Another customer-focused transparency tool is M&S’ new aeroplane label. Mike says, “It’s all about transparency. It’s not about carbon labelling. In the same way as customers might want to know where a product comes from, does it come from Kenya or does it come from the UK, they want to know whether the product has come here by plane or not and actually the amount of products we fly in is relatively small, but there are more and more questions about the mode of transport used and flights have the dominant impact in terms of CO2 emissions compared to road or rail or ship. So we’ve decided to put that label on to see if that’s what our customers want and require in terms of transparent information”.
It’s one thing to decide that you will become transparent, but how you achieve this is another matter entirely. Mike explains, “It’s important to honestly report on both the good and the less positive sides, inevitably you’ll tend to focus on the positives, but you must also have credibility to talk about not just what you’ve struggled with, but also what is new. I mean, a lot of these issues we are looking now are changing by the day, the sciences, the potential solutions – for example there is no absolute way of doing carbon labelling now, so I think exposing to the outside world some of the intellectual debates and challenges you are having about how to solve these issues is very important”.
Part of who we are
It’s clear for Mike that LBTL and Plan A are both very much part of the M&S brand, “We’ve got five brand values and one of them is trust. Plan A is a modern articulation of the word trust. If you look back 80 or 90 years, M&S was creating a trust advantage in its business back then by looking after its workforce better, before any of the major businesses did it, before it was the done thing. In the ‘70s M&S used philanthropy as a way of driving business benefits with a slogan we used back then ‘healthy backstreets means healthy high streets’”.
Is it worth it?
Why spend so much time, energy and money on these challenges? Is it just so that M&S don’t risk looking bad? Or is it a source of competitive advantage? Mike answers, “I think it’s a mixture of the two. We have been on a journey where 5-6 years ago we managed to avoid risk and I think today and in the future it’s about driving sales, efficiency and innovation in our business. And yes, it is driving sales. For example, when we decided to only sell Fairtrade tea and coffee, sales rose by 6%, which in a declining market for all tea and coffee, is fantastic”.
But as LBTL, and particularly Plan A, operate primarily as brand messages rather than product messages, Mike explains that it is not possible to attribute a particular percentage of M&S’ sales growth to them. He says, “It’s more ‘you can buy anything from M&S and be assured that we are striving and doing our very best to do business and produce products in the most sustainable way possible’, and even if we haven’t achieved that today, we want to achieve it in the future. It’s about re-energizing and modernizing the brand and taking it forward”.
Look behind the label campaign
Look behind the label campaign
Look behind the label campaign
Look behind the label campaign
Look behind the label campaign
Plan A campaign
Plan A campaign
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