Is your vinegar made from petroleum? H.J. Heinz Co. is running print ads to draw attention to U.S. federal regulations that allow certain vinegar-making processes to include petroleum. (Click here to read the article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.) The article admits it is not clear how many vinegars on supermarket shelves do actually contain ethyl alcohol derived from petroleum, but this lack of clarity is not unusual. Most consumers are blissfully unaware of what ingredients are used to make the brands they buy. However, the Internet is helping to change that, and the ramifications for brands could be far-reaching.
In the past, consumers in North America and Europe have assumed that the brands they buy are vetted by government bodies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Only this week the FDA issued a warning letter suggesting that Matrixx Initiatives Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel and Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs can cause temporary or permanent loss of the sense of smell. (Clicke here for article.)
The company has voluntarily withdrawn both items. Quoted in AdAge, Matrixx’s acting president, Bill Hemelt stated, “Neither our company nor I would ever market a product that we believe has a public safety concern.”
Of course, few consumers would ever buy a product if they knew it was unsafe (rather than just not good for them). The recent U.S. peanut butter scare resulted in a significant drop in sales for brands not even implicated in the contamination with salmonella. Concern over the safety of goods produced in China has led to consumers boycotting toys and pet foods. But in large part consumers are totally unaware of what goes into the products they buy. Ethyl alcohol might sound relatively innocuous on a vinegar brand’s ingredients label and, as far as I am aware, the source – corn, apples or petroleum - would have no bearing on its safety.
But what if the ingredients label says “fragrance”? According to the GoodGuide Web site, approximately one-third of the 3,000 compounds used by the fragrance industry are known allergens or respiratory irritants.
The claim that one-third of fragrance compounds are potentially unhealthy would be easy to discount if it did not come from a Web site master-minded by the man who blew the whistle on labor conditions in Nike’s Vietnam factories in 1997. Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at UC Berkeley has leveraged his research into supply chain management to create a site which to aggregates information from a wide variety of sources in order to rank brands according to their safety and ethical standards. (Click here to read a recent New York Times article on GoodGuide.)
The GoodGuide is getting a lot of coverage in mainstream media these days. It is quite a turnaround for an Internet startup that had trouble finding funding. But the lack of interest from venture capitalists is hardly surprising considering the site’s mission, which is to disclose the hidden side of branding—the ingredients, business practices and ethics that companies would rather consumers didnt know about.
If you want to know how your cereal, shampoo, or laundry detergent rates versus the competition, the GoodGuide aims to provide a ready answer. It provides a one-number summary for each brand based on health, environmental and social performance information. Although in beta right now, the GoodGuide promises to make a much more accessible complement to traditional watchdogs like the FDA. Simply by aggregating multiple data sources into an easily searchable site, it provides a resource for anyone interested in knowing the facts about the brands they buy.
From a marketer’s perspective, the GoodGuide might seem like a nightmare. But then, is it really in the long-term interests of your brand to use potentially harmful ingredients or to get caught out for poor environmental or labor practices? It would be far better, then, to be proactive and address issues now before they become public knowledge. The Internet and the advent of sites like the GoodGuide are just one aspect of a new world in which brands may be forced to act in everyone’s best interests, not just those of their shareholders.
So what do you think? Will sites like The GoodGuide have an influence on the future of brands? Perhaps by creating the means to compare the merits of different brands it will help justify a price premium for the ones that score well? What do you think?
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...
Email This Post
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:31 am
if one managed their brand/brand franchise/financial stream from a long term perspective, would any of these management decisions ever make the light of day?
brings to mind Garrett Hardin’s the “tragedy of the commons”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:01 am
Hi Nigel
This is a very important component of marketing. To date many marketers have skated around the edges — adding layers of charitable contributions or tie-ins (such as Red) — or even going so far as to correct for inequities caused by their manufacture — specifically soft drink companies in the developing world. But this can change things considerably, not unlike a carbon footprint , we can now have a common currency for just how much manufacturers are adding (or subtracting from) the social weal.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:12 am
Of course, Miro, few companies do manage their brand or business for the long-term.
The fundamental problem is that short-term gratification - commercial or personal - will almost always trump the long-term good. It takes a crisis to get brands and people to act differently.
The truly sad thing is that Hardin’s analysis is as true today as it was in 1968. The future of brands is one more challenge that is unlikely to be solved by a technical solution. Better media planning, social media and mobile advertising are just our version of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They serve to disguise the fact that most brands lack real relevance to their consumers and fail to treat them as real people with real needs and emotions. The few brands that do will win in the long-term.