Collaboration at the heart of sustainability

Jos Harrison at Reckitt argues that if FMCG brands are serious about sustainability, they must embrace collaboration

 

As a sector that’s largely contributed to a mindset centred on consumption, convenience, and immediacy, the FMCG industry bears a huge responsibility for the environmental crisis we find ourselves in. However, brand owners in FMCG are also uniquely placed to drive real change. 

 

Moving away from the predominant product ‘consumption’ paradigm; exploring service-led business models rather than providing solutions to people’s needs through the product level alone; shifting a focus on manufacturing millions of individual ‘consumer units’ towards exploring locally fulfilled services solutions – these are all part of shifting mindsets and business models that will allow brand owners to move in a more sustainable direction. 

 

Open to learn

To explore such shifts, however, and to realise their full potential – and fast – they need to embrace collaboration more whole-heartedly. 

 

Mobilising new business models at the scale required will only happen if companies are open to learn, to experiment, to acknowledge the expertise of smaller partners, and cast aside normal assumptions of proprietary technology. 

 

This idea of ‘co-opetition’ is not new, but it’s never been more important. It’s about acknowledging as a brand owner that you have competitors but also recognising that to evolve entire industries, you must cooperate to some degree with those competitors. Within FMCG this could mean cooperation and exchange of ideas around materials used, packaging formats, working with a single supplier base, helping retailers to make necessary transitions and so on.

 

For example, there is currently no large-scale example of true circular business models in FMCG, due to the need for enormous economies of scale to make them profitable. There are pilots or start-ups – such as Loop in the UK – but no mainstream adoption or roll-out. 

 

Co-opetition can enable the necessary volumes and geographical reach to make such closed-loop consumables solutions commercially viable. 

 

Embracing the competition 

It is part of a wider ambition for collaboration that would not just foster partnerships between direct competitors, but also an openness to learn from smaller enterprises. There might be smaller businesses that are more progressive, more pioneering when it comes to chemicals or materials advances, packaging changes or business model evolutions. It is crucial that brands at global corporate level are open to what they have to teach. 

 

Big business and such SMEs working alongside each other allows the former to help with scale while the smaller businesses can grow at the same time. It becomes a symbiotic relationship. Take our partnership between Oxfordshire-based laundry service Oxwash and Vanish. It is a pilot in which a global brand supports local service-providers to offer a more sustainable alternative to people. 

 

This approach is not just crucial within FMCG, but across many sectors across business – see Allbird’s collaboration with Adidas. The partnership between the sustainability-focused start-up and the global sportswear brand reimagines “what an ultralight running shoe could be with a mix of sustainable materials and our lowest carbon footprint to date”. 

 

Empowering communities 

As well as co-opetition among competitors, collaboration needs to embrace other institutions and communities to effect faster change. Engaging with communities is essential if you want to implement purpose-driven initiatives. The Body Shop partnering with the United Nation’s Envoy on Youth shows how important such relationships can be. It has launched the Be Seen Be Heard campaign supporting young people’s political participation and engagement.

 

The Co-Op’s Member Pioneers scheme, meanwhile, pays members a living way to act as community stewards, supporting schemes such as local youth groups and community spaces.

 

Of course, closer collaboration will require legal changes too – regulators and legal bodies will have to evolve what they define as anti-competitive; it requires a restructuring of the legal system to enable partnerships in any kind of meaningful way.

 

Just in time

Under the status quo, the evolution of our industry would gradually happen over the next 20 years, but we don’t have two decades to solve the problem of global warming. Without partnerships we will not be able to accelerate this change. Those already exploring these ideas are only the start of what’s needed, but they give a sense of what successful collaboration could and needs to look like. 

 

Given the urgency of the current situation and the fact that we might all be running out of time to solve this challenge, such changes need to be encouraged wholesale. It’s an opportunity for all the brightest parts of multiple industries to work together to shift people’s behaviour.

 

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Jos Harrison is Global Head of Brand Experience at Reckitt

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com