Results and Discussion of Exercise 1

And now for the results of Exercise 1 and some discussion! Remember, the instructions for Exercise 1 were, "Please sort these branded cards according to how sustainable you believe them to be. Create three groups: sustainable brands, unsustainable brands, and brands of unknown sustainability. You may have as many or as few cards in each group as you wish, but you must sort all the cards into one of the piles. The brands were as follows:

1. Adidas
2. American Apparel

3. Ben & Jerry’s
4. Chipotle
5. Chiquita
6. Haagen Dazs
7. Kettle Chips
8. SunChips
9. Timberland
10. Urban Outfitters

Results and Discussion of Exercise 1

The Structure of Sustainable Brands: Participants tended to frame brands as “sustainable” if they perceived them to be (1) a small business (2) a business with transparent operations and (3) a business that produces expensive products. The notion of transparent operations was heavily associated with domestic (U.S.) production, local products, and products produced by co-ops.

Small

On her feelings about big-business:

I don't know whether or not this is just a contrived thing of American culture but I, I definitely seem to trust it more if it's a smaller company. Um, for instance if I see, like, P&G says that they're, um, Proctor & Gamble has, like, cut energy by, like, a large, large percentage, or like, has made something organically I'm much more -- I'm much less likely to trust it than, like, if I see a smaller, like, farm company, um, saying the same thing. – Participant 26 #344-348

On why he placed Ben & Jerry’s in the sustainable category:

Just the whole idea of the theme that they’re trying to adopt it seemed like it was "alternative" to the big company – big corporation. And they started they started small, so I just associate those things with sustainable practices and other good things. Participant 27 #28-30

On why small businesses are more free to pursue sustainable strategies:

Larger corporations have a…larger pressure to make more money and smaller corporations can be based more around ideals. Participant 25 #414-416

Transparent

On why she sorted American Apparel into the sustainable category:

I mean, they are American Apparel; I think all of their clothing is made in the United States. It is -- I don’t know if it’s part of their mantra to be like fair in the labor wages and practices but I hope so -- assume so because it’s in this country. Participant 35 #11-14

On how Adidas could prove it is sustainable:

I don't know what kind of campaign they could put on. They'd try and keep jobs here and not exploit workers in other countries, you know, keep wages up well. Decrease the waste they produce. Again they'd have to show me that they were letting consumers know they were doing that. I'm not exactly sure how they would -- if they could directly make commercials to show that they are making efforts to stay sustainable. Participant 21 #146-150

Expensive

On the expense of sustainable clothing:

When I see things marketed as “environmentally friendly organic cotton” they’re way more expensive, so it’s hard for even me to make the decision to buy them. Participant 29 #205-207

On purchasing ethically made clothing:

You have to go to specialty stores, but then it’s really expensive -- out of my price range. You’ll see a lot of organic cotton, or things made out of hemp, or bamboo. So I think it’s there but you have to go looking for it and you can’t always afford it unless you are some chi chi environmentalist. Participant 9 #243-245

The Structure of Unsustainable Brands: Participants tended to frame a brand as “unsustainable” if they perceived it to be affiliated with (1) a big business (2) a business with opaque operations and (3) a business that produces cheap products. The notion of opaque operations was heavily associated with producing goods overseas in areas like China, South America, and Southeast Asia. These factors mirror the perceptions relied upon to distinguish the “sustainable” brands.

Big

On the sustainability potential of Unilever v. Ben & Jerry’s:

Unilever is a bigger corporation so I don’t know the specifics but I feel like with a bigger corporation it’s easier to move away from any mission they see as unprofitable. Whereas Ben and Jerry’s might just do stuff because the founders want to do it and it’s a good thing to do, a bigger corporation might not be as concerned with that. Participant 10 #88-92

On why he sorted Chiquita as unsustainable:

I assume they’re also a big company so are not really concerned with how their bananas are made in terms of environmental impact because they’re just trying to make money. Participant 10 #135-136

Opaque

On his skepticism about SunChips sustainable advertising:

I remember seeing those commercials that saying that their chips are solar powered and there are like those people dancing in the field, which is just so ridiculous, but I mean I’m sure they couldn’t say it unless it was partly true. But it’s like, okay, you’re giving me no actual information. You’re saying solar power and you’re showing happy people dancing and eating SunChips. That’s just like all right...that doesn’t tell me anything. Participant 40 #274-280

On why she sorted Urban Outfitters as unsustainable:

Urban Outfitters I put as unsustainable simply because on their labels, I mean, most of their clothing is coming from Southeast Asia and China, and based on broad sweeping generalizations and prior knowledge, most of the factories where these are made are big polluters, they are not necessarily paying fair wages. Participant 9 #211-213

On why he sorted Adidas as unsustainable:

When I think shoe companies I think sweatshops. And that's pretty much the same for the two clothing companies as well. I just think child laborers in China or something. Participant 27 #104-105

Cheap

On the price of producing sustainable goods:

There’s always going to be a price issue because one of the reasons they’re made so unsustainably is because it would cost money to do it sustainably, so I often thought to myself if I knew that something was more environmentally friendly and the difference in price was not prohibitive, I would actively support that. Participant 29 #222-225

On why he placed Adidas in the unsustainable group:

I know Adidas works with rubber for example for their shoes, so I'm sure that it's cheaper to synthetically make rubber in a less-sustainable way. Again, I don't know anything that Adidas does in that direction I just assumed that they are looking for profit margins since I've never heard them advertising anything towards sustainability. Participant 6 #183-186

I think Wal-Mart is sort of notorious for poor labor practices and that’s why they’re so cheap. Participant 35 #698-699

Unknown Sustainability

When participants categorized a brand as being of “unknown sustainability” they attributed some factors from the “sustainable” category as well as some factors from the “unsustainable” category to the brand. Timberland was sorted into this pile on several occasions because my participants had a difficult time deciding whether the brand’s association with nature was indicative of sustainable business. Both Participant 43 and Participant 27 saw a potential conflict between the ‘naturalist’ philosophy of the brand and the way it is manufactured, leading them to place it in the unknown category.

I don't really know anything about Timberland. The only thing I really associate them with is an outdoorsy back to nature philosophy, but I don't really identify that as - I mean you think they serve to like outdoors oriented clientele that they would be environmentally responsible, but that doesn't mean they're socially responsible and it doesn't actually mean they're environmentally responsible, so I don't really know. Participant 43 #187-191

Timberland I had no idea either way. I had my clothing manufacturer pointing me towards bad, but there are all sorts of naturalist stuff. So that was a good pull and I decided to put it in the middle, but I don’t really know. Participant 27 #173-175

Although I recruited participants who claimed to be differently committed to caring about sustainable business practices and buying sustainable goods, these respondents adhered to these frameworks relatively consistently, so the way participants characterized “sustainable” and “unsustainable” brands was basically consistent across responses.

Affective Qualities of Sustainable and Unsustainable Brands: Participants were also likely to associate “sustainable” and “unsustainable” brands with different affective qualities. Sustainable brands were characterized as brands from companies with “authentically sustainable business practices” as well as a “concern” for communities, the environment, and their employees. For instance, Participant 29 considered SunChips authentically sustainable because they were engaged in operating sustainably before it was popular.

They were doing that a few years before the whole fad, to my knowledge, and so I think it’s something they actually care about – it’s a priority to the corporation or its directors that “this is our model, this is our marketing, this is who we are. Participant 29 #29-31

Participant 22 characterized Ben & Jerry’s as authentically sustainable because of the company was started with sustainable values in mind.

I can't say…that I put that much research into the sustainability of Ben & Jerry's, but knowing how they started...just like together as like these two liberal guys and everything like that. And although it has grown to this huge corporation I feel like they still have some moral, more progressive values behind what they do. Participant 22 #10-14.

Regarding a company’s concern for communities, people, and the environment, Participant 11 noted that SunChips might be considered sustainable because it is healthy, which is good for people and may reflect a larger concern for workers and the environment.

I felt they probably wouldn't be as bad as someone like Lays because of the fact that like the product itself is marginally more healthy, so maybe that like translates into a little bit of a greater consciousness about workers rights and environmental rights. Participant 11 #84-87

Participant 17 was willing to sort Timberland into the sustainable category based on the fact that they seem to care about nature.

They have a tree on their logo, and if you care about trees and the outdoors, then you are probably sustainable in some capacity. Participant 17 #333-334

Participant 26 noted that she would be more willing to sort companies who are engaged with the community into the sustainable group. Interacting with members of the community is associated with concern on the part of the business.

For a company to be well-rounded I think that the company should just interact on a more personal level with the people it’s working to serve -- the people who purchase the products. Participant 26 #473-475

Unsustainable brands, on the other hand, were characterized as brands from companies that had either no sustainable business practices or sustainable claims based on minimal actions and falsely constructed images of sustainability. For instance, when Participant 38 talked about whether one should trust organic labels, he alluded to the notion that some companies would purposely lie to consumers to sell sustainable products.

They don’t realize that words like organic can be like argued for if they were actually like contested. Someone could easily just say like well yeah, it’s organic because I do this one thing and, you know, I am not claiming that I do all these other things, I just say it’s organic. And I think a lot of companies are exploiting that, because people are really getting into like eco, into anything that you put “eco” in front of they’re like, “Oh, that’s environmentally friendly, I’ll pay an extra like 50 cents for that.” Participant 38 #110-115

Similarly, Participant 26 noted that SunChips should not necessarily be considered sustainable regardless of how it is marketed because a company that does not exude sustainable qualities owns it.

I think it does help Frito-Lay's image, to have this company that's considered healthier and made through means that don't harm the environment as much. So I think it does help Frito-Lay as a brand, but it also kind of takes away from the impact that SunChips have, because they are made by this giant conglomerate that doesn't necessarily stand for sustainability. Participant 26 #130-13

The Semi-Structured Interview Process

Great news! I have finished collecting all of my data and have begun to analyze it using grounded theory. Data collection consisted of an online survey, followed by semi-structured interviews with 20 willing participants.

These interviews took about an hour each, so getting them transcribed was quite a task. Luckily someone invented Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing website, which gave me access to a bunch of humans who were willing to transcribe these interviews (for a little money). It is a great resource, and it saved me the onerous task of transcribing all 20 hours of interviews.

Now, lets go into a little detail about what the interviews consisted of. They were semi-structured, which means that I did not have a fixed set of questions to ask. Rather, I allowed myself the freedom to ask different questions to each interviewee depending on what he/she said.

To get my interviewees talking about the issue of sustainability as it relates to both social and environmental concerns I devised a series of (index card) sorting exercises. These exercises were intended to get my interviewees to share what brands strike them as sustainable and why (Exercise 1). I also wanted to find out how my participants ‘believe’ any company ‘should’ act (Exercise 2). Finally, I wanted to explore whether any of the brands from Exercise 1 could be associated/disassociated with the behaviors the interviewee had identified as ‘important’ during Exercise 2 (Exercise 3).

A more robust description of each exercise follows:

Exercise 1: Please sort these branded cards according to how sustainable you believe them to be. Create three groups: sustainable brands, unsustainable brands, and brands of unknown sustainability. You may have as many or as few cards in each group as you wish, but you must sort all the cards into one of the piles.

1. Adidas
2. American Apparel
3. Ben & Jerry’s
4. Chipotle
5. Chiquita
6. Haagen Dazs
7. Kettle Chips
8. SunChips
9. Timberland
10. Urban Outfitters

Once participants sorted these brands I asked a series of questions to explore the participant’s reasons for sorting the brands into the groups they did.



Exercise 2: Please sort these behavior cards in to a hierarchy according to how important it is to you that a company engages in each of these activities. Behaviors may tie for a position on the scale. If one or more of these behaviors is not important at all to you, please do not include the card in your ranking system.

1. Employees may organize and bargain collectively
2. Company is actively working to reduce energy and resource consumption
3. Company is working to reduce the amount of waste it creates
4. Company employs independent monitors to oversee overseas production
5. Company practices environmental stewardship even if the country it operates in lacks environmental regulations
6. Employees have freedom from forced labor
7. Company is engaged with the community and supportive of it
8. Company employs metrics to measure and manage energy consumption
9. Employees earn a living wage
10. Employer sponsors job-related education programs for employees
11. Company routinely collaborates with non-profit groups

It is noteworthy that none of these behaviors include corporate behavior related to the accumulation of profit. For this research I took it as granted that companies are expected to generate profit in order to fulfill responsibilities to stockholders, so I chose to focus this exercise particularly on behaviors that tend to be associated with sustainable businesses. After the participants sorted the eleven behaviors into a hierarchy I asked them to explain why they felt compelled to place the behaviors where they did on their respective hierarchies.



Exercise 3: Please use the groups of branded cards and your hierarchy of behavior cards to answer the following question: Do you associate/disassociate any of these brands with the corporate behaviors you identified as important?

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So, that’s the long and short of my interview process. I have begun coding (to identify key points) the transcripts using grounded theory. From there I will begin to elucidate a theory to explain the themes that emerge – that’s the interesting part, so stay tuned!

After Hiatus + Project Abstract

It has been a while since my last entry. The project took me on quite a ride throughout the month of December, which resulted in some changes to my methodology. Now, rather than collecting my data solely through online surveys, I will be employing a two-step data collection process, which includes a large-scale online survey as well as semi-structured interviews with some willing respondents.

These methodological changes required me to resubmit my study to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval.

Happily, I am to the point in the project where I can begin collecting and analyzing data. I will be putting my online survey into the field very soon, and from those responses I will select 20 interviewees to participate in the semi-structured interview portion of data collection.

With any luck I will have some interesting findings to share soon. Until then, perhaps you could entertain yourself with the project abstract.

Abstract:

Although American consumers have begun to demand more environmentally and socially sustainable products, people may not always have the information they need to differentiate between brands on the basis of social and environmental performance. I will explore this phenomenon with a series of semi-structured interviews designed to discern and examine the types of information Northwestern students use to make decisions about sustainable brands. I will also evaluate the importance of sustainable business practices to students, and ask them to identify companies that exhibit these behaviors. I plan to collect detailed data about the type of information respondents use to evaluate sustainable brands as well as why and how people come to associate a particular company with sustainable or unsustainable behavior.

Measuring Sustainability Practices

An important portion of my project includes asking my survey respondents to identify which of two companies in a pair manufactures its products in a sustainable way. Of course, an objective standard of "sustainability" is hard to come by, so how could I truly ask my respondents to differentiate these companies?

One of the best known sustainability measures is the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which was launched in 1999 to enable people to track the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies. Each year it releases a review of the companies in the index and ranks them based on their environmental, economic, and social performance. The companies, of course, use their nomination to get a little good PR about their eco-friendly behavior. Research suggests, however, that DJSI tends to have a large cap bias. In other words, it tends to be biased toward larger corporations. (Cerrin & Dobers. (2000). What does the Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index tell us?)

Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com notes that consumers shouldn't get too excited if a company is named to the DJSI because "it isn’t really a marker for 'green.'" Although he agrees that there may be some truth to DJSI claims that these companies are the "leading sustainability-driven companies," Makower also notes that being named as a component of the DJSI doesn't necessarily mean that these companies have comprehensive green policies and practices, let alone performance. (Is the Dow Jones Sustainability Index Worth a damn? @ grist.org)

In the absence of any truly objective measure of sustainability, I wanted to make sure the companies I chose for my pairings could reasonably be distinguished by their commitment to sustainability. In order to do this, I spent a lot of time reading through company reports like 10ks, sustainability & CSR reports, corporate labor codes, and annual reports to try to get an understanding of each company's practices in three areas, respectively: environmental impacts, labor standards, and community engagement.

In the following posts, I will detail the 6 pairs of companies I have selected for this project. By exploring each company's commitment to protecting the environment, upholding labor standards, and benefiting the communities they are located in, I hope to present an accurate picture of the company's sustainability efforts. Since the pairs were selected based on how differently the companies operated, the information should give the reader a good idea of which company should be voted the "most sustainable" of the pair.

Corporate Pairs

My last entry on research methodology noted that one portion of the survey I will administer is a series of six advertisement comparisons. After viewing each pair, the survey respondent will be asked to identify which product in the pair is likely to be manufactured by a company that operates in an environmentally and socially sustainable way and explain his reasoning.

Before I post an entry elaborating on which companies are which, I encourage all of you to look through the advertisements I have selected and think about these comparisons for yourself. Can you identify the sustainable product effectively?

Visit https://depot.northwestern.edu/adh712/Advertisements/?view=RSS to view the media files

Sun Chips vs. Kettle Chips

Green Mountain Energy vs. Clean Coal

American Apparel vs. Urban Outfitters

Haagen Dazs vs. Ben & Jerry’s

Chipotle vs. Chiquita

Adidas vs. Timberland

Research Methods

In Theory 101, we discussed greenwashing briefly. You were given the example of Royal Dutch Shell's advertising campaign, where the company boasted of its commitment to sustainability and investments in alternative energy while simultaneously selling off the majority of their alternative energy investments. The non-profit agency CorpWatch found this type of behavior so common that they created a bimonthly Greenwash award. Recipients are corporations that put more money, time, and energy into promoting their eco-friendly images than actually protecting the environment. The term “greenwashing” is used to describe the process whereby an environmentally destructive corporation attempts to preserve or expand their market share by posing as environmental stewards. In current literature, there does not seem to be a commonly accepted term for falsifying or omitting the negative social impacts of products.

This type of behavior on the part of corporations is probably detrimental to American consumers (Dragon, 1991, Carrigan & Attalla, 2001). Although there has been little research on the matter, it seems plausible that misleading or confusing information about the social and environmental impacts of company products prevent consumers from attaining the information they need to effectively purchase sustainable products. Indeed, there is some evidence that this is already the case. According to research by the National Consumer Council, although individuals seem to be concerned about sustainability and may want to buy responsibly made products, people are unsure of what sustainable consumption entails in practice (Holdsworth 2003).

My research seeks to investigate this phenomenon further by evaluating to what extent American consumers are able to apply their knowledge of sustainability to accurately assess the sustainability impacts of ubiquitous goods. If consumers have difficulty identifying sustainable products, then impacts follow. For instance, greenwashed goods could generate competitive pressures that may force down the price of high value goods. This effect would drive genuinely sustainable goods out of the market or at least prevent sustainable companies from growing their businesses, regardless of increased consumer demand.

Research Methods:

I have devised an experiment designed to test a respondent’s ability to distinguish between the sustainability impacts of two products. Respondents will be asked to differentiate these products by thinking about the general sustainability practices of the companies that produce the respective products. The survey will be administered electronically but in a central location Northwestern’s campus. Currently I intend to obtain permission from SESP faculty to utilize conference rooms in Annenberg Hall to administer my study (See Appendix A for an example of the survey instrument). Because the definition of “sustainability” can be tenuous, I will present a definition of sustainability at the outset of the survey[1]. In order to keep respondents thinking about this single, coherent definition of sustainability, I will provide respondents with this definition along with other key definitions for the duration of the survey.

The first eight questions of this survey are intended to segment respondents based on how much they know and care about sustainability as a general concept. They will be asked about their own purchasing habits as well as about their objective knowledge of sustainability, like knowledge of eco-labels. After this portion of the survey, respondents will view 6 pairs of advertisements that have appeared recently on television or in print. Survey respondents will be shown one pair of these advertisements initially, but will proceed through all six pairs in time, one after another. If the advertisement is a short video, the pair will be shown one clip at a time, but these two clips will be displayed next to each other on the screen, inviting the respondent to make use of the provided material in answering the final question.

The pairings consist of two companies that manufacture similar products. One company in each of these pairs has been identified as committed to sustainability, while the other had taken almost no decisive action in favor of these principles, although they may have advertised that they have. Companies are said to be committed to sustainability in that they are making conscious efforts to reduce waste, maintain the natural world, benefit the communities they are located in as well as enhance the livelihoods of those individuals include in their supply chain like farmers, subcontractors, and factory laborers. I have extensive notes on these six companies and corporate practices regarding human rights, environmental protection, and community engagement. These notes will serve as a way to establish a sort of objective standard about the sustainability commitments of these companies.

One would assume that individuals who exhibit more knowledge of and commitment to sustainability during the initial part of the survey would outperform other respondents in successfully identifying sustainable companies during the advertisement paring. Indeed, if individuals are clear about what sustainable production entails, they should be able to distinguish relatively easily which company is which. I hypothesize, however, that all respondents, regardless of their score on the first portion of the survey, will have a difficult time sorting companies into the binary provided, and they will also have difficult time delineating arguments as to why they feel the way they do. This may lead to short, vague responses on the open response question following each advertisements pair.

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[1] Sustainability (n): The potential for long-term maintenance of Earth’s ecosystem, which depends on making trade offs between the economic, social, and environmental spheres to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

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Carrigan, M. & Attalla, A. (2001). The myth of the ethical consumer – do ethics matter in purchase behavior? Journal of Consumer Marketing, 18(2), 560-578.

Dragon International (1991). Corporate reputation – does the consumer care? Dragon International, London.

Holdsworth, M. (2003). Green choice: What choice? London: National Consumer Council.

Sustainability = Social + Environmental?

I’ve already dedicated one entry to the definition of sustainability as I intend to use it. Upon meeting with my advisor, however, I realized that this definition perhaps requires further explanation. Namely, why does sustainability entail both the welfare of environmental systems as well as the welfare of creatures living within the ecosystem?

This argument really turns on the development of social capital, so I will introduce the concept first. Social capital is a neutral term for naturally occurring social networks. The concept comprises relations of trust, reciprocity, common rules, norms and sanctions, as well as connectedness in institutions. These networks are vital because, in the words of Robert Putnam, these long-term, face-to-face relationships are what “enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives” (Putnam 1995).

To what extent, then, is social capital a prerequisite for long-term improvements in the environment? It seems apparent that natural capital can be improved or protected in the short-term without any attention to social capital. Indeed, regulations and economic incentives could be used to encourage a change in behavior, or strictly protected areas could be established along with regulations regarding environmental maintenance (Pretty et al, 2000). Although these regulations may change behavior, regulation and economic incentives do not be the stuff that really changes hearts and minds in favor of environmental protection.

Jules Pretty and Hugh Ward argue that social capital, rather than regulation, is necessary for sustainable and equitable solutions to natural resource management. To prove their point, they evaluate how rural communities have dealt with the task of improving and distributing natural capital. They note that these local groups do seem to manage and preserve resources more efficiently and effectively than external agencies like governments, companies, or NGOs, although these agencies may assist the community groups by increasing their skill set or training leaders. Examples include micro-finance institutions, forest protection groups in India and Nepal, and groups designated to equalize water use in the Phillipies and Sri Lanka (Pretty and Ward 2001).

Because natural capital is a public good, the market tends to overuse and under-invest in it. Indeed, the market effectually signals that natural capital is valued at $0 until it is turned into something. Most companies operate for profit, which means it is always in their best interest to chop down that forest and turn it into products for sale. In this way, a company receives the economic benefits that come from selling a product made from a natural resource, while society at large would split the (yet unidentified) cost of losing 1 forest. Social institutions based on trust and reciprocity, as well as agreed norms and behavior can mediate this sort of unfettered private action, preserving natural capital.

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Pretty, J and Frank, B.R. (2000). Participation and social capital formation in natural resource management: achievements and lessons. Paper for the International Landcare 2000 Conference, Melbourne, Australia. 2-5 March 2009.

Pretty, J. and Ward, H. (2001). Social capital and the environment. World Development, 29(2). 209-227.

Putnam, R. (1995). Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. Political Science and Politics.

Klein, N. (2000). No Logo. NY: Picador.