Corporate responsibility – it’s a matter of desire

June 2, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Uncategorized 

I chaired a seminar here this morning jointly hosted with the up and coming brand communication consultancy TLG. The focus was sustainable and ethical business, but as is often the case with these things, it was hard to get past the motherhood and apple pie declarations of corporate goodwill. I came away thinking that it is in the sphere of product development and marketing that the real test of corporate responsibility lies. 

There is no question that a lot of companies are taking carbon reduction seriously. Paul Kelly from ASDA laid out this morning some very ambitious objectives that have been publicly set for his company. Hearing from other brands and also listening to the work of  the Carbon Trust and Fairtrade it was also clear that more companies are beginning to look seriously not just at their own shop window but also at their supply chains. 

But the aim still seems to be to manage the carbon impacts of whatever products consumers can be persuaded to buy. I remember writing a very early blog on the subject of digital photo frames. Millions of people have bought this product even though – as I understand it – it requires three pieces of equipment to be on all the time (the PC, the router and the frame itself).  

With many products the big carbon impacts are very clear and could be addressed with innovation. For mobile phones, for example, it is chargers being left on, the energy used in accessing the network and the impact of people replacing their handsets every few months. At last, smart chargers are now being developed that turn themselves off after a certain time, but why has it taken so long to address this and how hard will the industry push to diffuse this technology? 

Our persuasive technologies project here at the RSA aims to get into some of these issues by exploring how design of products and processes can encourage pro-social behaviour. But the corporate sector as a whole has to be willing not just to celebrate the way it is trying to green what it does, but to ask how it might work with Government and consumers to change unsustainable behaviours.  

Last night I read a great essay by Mark Hopkinson from University College Oxford about the rise of consumerism. I had no idea that as early as 1932 Franklin Roosevelt said ‘I believe we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought; that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer’.  

Hopkinson’s big point is that the flaw with consumer politics (the idea that politics should be judged by whether it meets our demands as consumers) lies in the insatiability of our desires. And, as Neal Lawson will argue in his forthcoming book ‘All Consuming’, marketing and advertising is all about increasing and channelling that insatiability.  

Hopkinson ends his piece with this statement: 

‘…if consumer aspirations are fuelled but not limited by the growth of the economy, while its politics are based around satisfying those aspirations, then down-payments on future growth are likely to be stretched and accelerated‘.

 Absolutely – and, by the way, not a bad description of the mind set that led ultimately to the credit crunch. 

A really challenging corporate agenda on sustainability would be about the manufacturing of desires not just how to reduce the impact of meeting those desires.

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3 Comments on Corporate responsibility – it’s a matter of desire

  1. Jamie on Tue, 2nd Jun 2009 11:52 am

    2. Tim Jackson’s report for the Sustainable Development Comission is very much about this – he argues for Prosperity without Growth – and writes that we need to recognise that “the requirements of prosperity go way beyond material sustenance” and that prosperity has “vital social and psychological dimensions”.

    I share your hatred of electronic photo frames. In my rather Puritan way, I’d much prefer it if the corporate sector (including designers and advertisers) focused on how they can help meet my needs rather than try to create new material ones.

    I like this quote from Victor Papanek: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. and possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today”.

    With apolgies to any advertisers.

  2. Simon on Wed, 3rd Jun 2009 9:42 am

    3. It is surely right to minimise carbon emissions – but my understanding is that smart phone chargers would not be a very high priority if we were serious about cutting energy use.

    Professor David MacKay (Physics Professor at Cambridge) has been crunching the numbers on energy savings. I’ll quote him

    “My measurements indicate that my phone chargers consume less than 0.5W when left plugged in. The total power consumption of the average Brit is 5000W. (Including car driving, home heating, and so forth, not just electricity.) So obeying the BBC’s advice, always unplug the phone charger, could potentially reduce British energy consumption by one hundredth of one percent (if only people would do it). Is there any chance that this emphasis on phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a tea-strainer?”

    He featured in a great ‘More or Less’: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/8016366.stm

  3. Joe Nutt on Thu, 4th Jun 2009 7:42 am

    4. I was invited to attend a lecture last week given by Prof Michael Braungart whose Cradle to Cradle sustainability initiative has attracted some major international companies and I could see exactly why. He is an international research chemist who has developed a really seductive narrative for any business genuinely wishing to behave in a more eco-friendly way. He exposes the negative, punitive, typically puritanical and guilt-ridden thinking underlying the Al Gore approach and replaces it with a counter intuitive, but fascinatingly positive narrative.

    His approach is genuinely holistic and he was able to trot out one example after another of where the accepted thinking or approach to what is considered green behaviour, is woefully misguided or just plain wrong. For example, you can feel as smug as you like for buying a new, greener car, but if it really is “green” and not black, then you can wipe that smile straight off your face because the copper in the pigment will have far more deleterious effects on the environment than anything to do with the engine or emissions.

    He talks not about recycling buy…up-cycling, i.e. products can be disassembled into constituent parts, and re-assembled either as the same or as something else. He passed round some material used to cover airline seats which looked and felt, very high quality, but is…edible!. Like the rest of the audience, I was impressed not just by the real science he is so obviously in command of, but by the ingenuity with which he examines a manufacturing process and its chemistry.

    His entire approach to green business and efficiency, struck me as extremely clever and makes current practice and language about eco-friendly business sound both false and redundant. His organisation is called EPEA.

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