Can brands save the world? Marketing Article 

Richard Reed, co-founder, Innocent

Business shapes society more than anything else these days.  Business has this unbelievable amount of resource, expertise, time, computers, desks phones, people, contacts that other entities in societies don’t have.  And this isn’t me banging on like some naïve hippy, this is Michael Lee-Porter, who says business can use the resources it’s got at its disposal to have a greater impact on social good than any other institution.  Maybe we can take the responsibility ourselves to sort out global warming just by making sure we’re getting carbon out of our supply chain? They can be little things, they can be medium things, they can be big things, but all of it can contribute to making things a little bit better rather than a little bit worse. 

So we have a very simple five-point strategy for the business.  One is that we will only ever make drinks that are genuinely good for people, we see that as our most important responsibility.  We’ll then make sure that we do what we can to increase the supply of ethically grown fruits of the world.  It costs –we’re using Rainforest Alliance pineapples at the moment and paying 30% premium on those pineapples versus the regular pineapples. We’re hoping over time that as more people come on board the price will get reduced. I can’t have a business model that’s paying 30% more for its core ingredients long term but we can for a while, especially if it’s going to help increase the supply globally. 

We also have sustainable packaging, so we bought out the world’s first recycled plastic bottle this year, and we’re pushing forward on taking the amount of paper out of the cartons. None of these things are big in their own right but hopefully, over time, they add up to lots of little things. 

We’re always making sure the business is resource efficient, so Innocent’s always run on 100% green electricity.  Our biggest manufacturing partner has moved to green electricity and that instantly took out 15% carbon dioxide embedded in each and every Innocent smoothie carton which is a material change and one that they feel was worth paying 10% more for their electricity. 

And the fifth thing we did as part of the business model was make sure a minimum of 10% of profits go to charity each year, principally back into the countries where the fruit comes from to aid rural development projects.  And giving 10% away is a nice headline of course, but what it means is we’re still keeping 90% for ourselves and we ain’t some latter day saints.  My belief is if you can’t achieve what you need to achieve in your business with 90% of your profits then you’re probably not just being as efficient as a business as you could be.

Now we do all that sort of stuff I guess because we’re lucky, right?  Because I set up the business with my two friends and it was a piece of paper and we don’t answer to anyone apart from ourselves and our parents so we can actually sort of make it the way that we want it to be.  But if I had to come up with the economic rationale of why it’s worth businesses to widen out the remit it would be this. One, I think it allows you to have a more engaged, loyal consumer base.  Second, I think it can get you closer to retailers. Our annual Big Knit sees people knit little woollen hats, for the Innocent smoothie bottles and sold through Sainsbury’s and with 50p raised for charity to keep old people warm during the winter.  Twenty thousand old people in the UK still die each winter through lack of heating.

Again, no chance does it pay back, I mean the guy that came up with the idea of getting these hats knitted and raising money for charity and I said good luck mate but it’s never going to work, so I happily signed it off.  I just couldn’t believe he’d thought it was the way you were going to get grannies to knit these little hats.  He gets 3,000 hats knitted that first year, fine.  Second year is 20,000; I’m starting to get a bit hot under the collar.  Third year it’s 80,000, fourth year it’s 220,000, this year it’s over 400,000 hats all knitted by volunteers.

I think the biggest, commercial benefit is allowing you to keep an intelligent, committed group of people engaged for longer.  I get a groundswell of motivation for myself about the fact that we’re trying to do things just a little bit differently and I think the rest of the team do too.  And I think maybe you could try and extrapolate that there’s a benefit there in terms of attracting brilliant, committed but commercial people and keeping them on for longer. 

So anyway, as I say, we do it because we always have done it that way and we never thought about it, it was just the way we wanted to do business.  But I accept it’s very easy for me to be like that because we set up the business from scratch.  There’s an opportunity commercially, be it with your consumers, be it with the people that work for the business, be it your retailers. It’s not supposed to be all hippie nonsense, there is supposed to be some hard economic commercial benefits in doing all this sort of stuff.  There’s nothing better than doing well by doing good. 

The best example I heard recently was a team of Microsoft employees that worked in East Europe during the Balkan war.  The NGOs said the biggest problem we’ve got is refugees, we’ve got 200,000 displaced people, we don’t know who they are, they don’t know who they are, everyone’s trying to meet everyone, basically we’ve got a database problem.  So they went back to Microsoft, who wrote and coded a database to be used to track refugees and now that software is used pretty with all NGOs and refugee situations across the world. So no money, Microsoft aren’t asking for their royalties, but they have got that team that has honed its developments skills and feels closer to its employer by developing something with a social benefit.

There really is this win-win out there and to use the cliché that we can get rich and do good too. And I just think that’s going to make us look much better down the golf club right?  I mean even if we just do it for our own selfish reasons then let’s do it.  Because I think history will judge us harshly.