Examination of Witnesses (Question Number
39)
MR MIKE
BARRY
14 NOVEMBER 2007
Q39 Chairman: Good afternoon, Mr Barry.
Thank you very much for coming in. I wonder if we could start
by asking you just to give us some details on Marks & Spencer's
attitude to environmental labelling and the kind of information
you give to your customers to help them understand the environmental
impacts of their choices?
Mr Barry: It will be a pleasure.
I would like to start with the consumers, because ultimately whether
we label or not is pretty much dependent upon their views. We
have segmented British consumers into four specific groups. There
are 20 to 25% of British consumers who are not interested in environmental
social issues at the moment, a lot of which is driven by poverty;
they are too poor to care about climate change or saving people
in Africa, they have just got to get through their own day. The
next group is the largest group, they are about 40 per cent, and
they are saying, "I am quite concerned about environmental
and social issues, but I don't believe I can personally make a
difference. If I give up flying, if I give up meat, if I give
up ready meals and a billion people in China and India start consuming
them, what is the point? I have just shot myself in the foot."
What that group of people actually want to know is that if they
do make a change it is a change which many people around them
will make with them. They are part of a collective change mechanism.
The third group, 25% roughly, is saying, "We are concerned
about environmental and social issues, very concerned, but we
lead busy, complex lives. We will do things if you make it easy
for us. If I walk into one of your stores and my only option to
buy coffee and tea is Fairtrade, great, you know, I'll buy into
it, I won't walk out, but when I've actively got to seek out the
Fairtrade option amongst dozens and dozens of different product
options in your store in 10 busy minutes, probably not."
Then there is the fourth group and the group which perhaps is
represented in this room today, which is the 10% of green crusaders.
That group has doubled in the last five years, which is very encouraging,
but it is 10%, and they are the only significant group at this
stage that want to use environmental and social labels on a day
to day basis, we believe. So if we just take that a little bit
further and if we actually sit down with focus groups and ask
our consumers, "What do you want us to do? If you care so
passionately about these issues, what do we do next?" consistently
they say to us, "Okay, I personally as a consumer will take
some responsibility. It's 25% of the job I will do. 75% of it
is you, Marks & Spencer," or another big business, "You've
got to take a lead on this. I've seen your message and I'm willing
to buy into a greener way of doing things, but boy you'd better
be the ones that take a lead on it and do the hard work for me."
Just to complete the introduction with that, we believe that means
that much of what we talk about today is actually about management
standards for a big retail such as Marks & Spencer to manage
its supply chains, 2,000 factories, 15,000 farmers, half a million
in the developing world making products for us. A lot of what
we currently call environmental and social labels are actually
management tools by which we can drive and enforce change across
our supply chains and then report to society on the progress we
are making. We made a big commitment back in January for something
called Plan A, 100 commitments, where we basically said all our
wood products in the future will be FSC or recycled. You do not
have to worry about it as you walk around the store, whether it
is the wood on the de«cor, the marketing de«cor, the
wooden furniture or even the wood in this suit, the cellulosic
fibre here made from wood, it will be all FSC and recycled. Now,
I will give you proof points, I will give you information about
that, but very, very clearly I am not going to stick on 10 different
labels on every single product I sell. We have 35,000 different
products in M&S, which is small for a retailer. Many retailers
carry quarter of a million different lines. To put a label or
multiple labels covering Fairtrade, pesticides, environmental
issues, carbon, on every single one of those products would drive
us to distraction, our suppliers to distraction and also the consumer.
Now, that is not to dismiss all labels. Some labels, for example
Fairtrade works fantastically well, and just let me capture why
that is. Fairtrade works very, very well because it is based on
four or five things. It is an independent standard that I cannot
influence. It is an independent standard. The second thing is
that it is a very complex set of issues behind this but actually
it is just a world that you buy into as a consumer. Thirdly, it
is all about grass roots movement. It is not just that label chucked
out there, there are hundreds of thousands of people who feel
passionately about Fairtrade around the UK, meeting in church
halls, driving it forward, encouraging their friends to buy into
it. The marketing is very good by the Fairtrade Foundation to
generally raise awareness of everything. Finally, it is an issue
which consumers can just about get their heads around: the poor
people in the poorest parts of the world get a bit more of the
price that I pay here in the UK for the product. So for those
four or five reasons Fairtrade works very, very well as a standard.
I am not sure that every label that we consider will tick those
boxes. So that is just a brief introduction of our current position.
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