More Sales Leading To A Better Environment...

The concurrent theme in the articles of this week aim to highlight the growing move of multinational companies that rely on a large consumer base, towards a more rural market or rather what has been called the “base of the pyramid”. As mentioned in my blog last week I highlighted this exact same approach of Unilever Pakistan Ltd to help develop its rural market by releasing smaller, more affordable, units of its main brands. The innovative approach was very successful with Unilever and led to it increasing its sales by 15% in the 1^st Quarter the innovations were introduced. By targeting the previously neglected rural sector of Pakistan Unilever aims to double its business by the year 2015 as it comprises nearly 65% of Pakistan’s population of 180 million people.

This week however I aim to highlight how this development is occurring at a reduced social impact which makes it truly revolutionary. Yes, so Unilever’s agenda is to double its sales while reducing its global environmental footprint by half! Normally increased production results in more production resulting in more waste of resources both natural and otherwise. This time around though Unilever and other multinational FMCG’s seem to be cognizant of this issue and are taking aims to rectify the environmental problems associated with previous booms in production. One reason for this is also that according to research conducted by Unilever (while I was employed there) an average person is more inclined to purchase a brand that has a history of being environmentally friendly or “socially conscious”. How exactly can an FMCG reduce its global environmental footprint? The rationale is that “Small Actions lead to Big Changes”. Let us look at how this theme could be applied to a daily aspect of our lives; doing laundry.  Unilever calculated that a significant part of its water footprint came from washing clothes by hand in rural countries, nearly 38% in fact. They went about fixing this by (a) fixing their supply chain (b) introduction of new, more environmental friendly products. For (a) they drastically reduced water use in the production process (up to 17% per ton of production) and this is also visible in their production partnerships such as of tea based products where Unilever partnered with its tea providing farmers to help innovate and introduce new water saving agricultural processes. In (b) though the real innovation comes where they introduced products like Comfort One Rinse where only one bucket of water is necessary to do an entire households clothing. This product has reached 12.5 million households and if all Unilever consumers in Asia used One Rinse we are looking at possibly saving on 500 Billion Liters of water!

This and other sustainable plans of production can be studied at http://www.unilever.pk/sustainable-living/uslp/.  There is more on how the company is dealing with waste, greenhouse gases and better livelihoods. My question for the week is one of introspection. How many of us in class would be influenced to buy a product simply because it was environmentally friendly? Would that label make any change in the average consumer according to you? Obviously companies the world over think so but it would be interesting to see how the microcosm that is our class reflects on this as there are obviously individuals from multiple nationalities and cultures and it would be interesting how this stance resonates with them.