Earlier this year, Greenpeace went after Nestle to stop using palm oil from Sinar Mas, a company in Indonesia.  They made a revolting take-off on the Kitkat advertisement in which you see a guy taking a Kitkat, breaking off a row and starting to eat it.  Except that it’s an orangutan’s finger, and blood spurts out and drips down his chin and… you get the picture.  It was too gross to pass on, and most who saw it clicked away.

Nestle was outraged.

They contacted Google (YouTube) and requested the film be removed as it infringed on their trademark.  Google complied, and Greenpeace had their moment.  They immediately requested that people complain on Nestle’s facebook page.

…and the complaints poured in

Nestle’s facebook page was besieged by complaints.  This got the press interested internationally (CNN, Daily Telegraph, Cnet, the Globe & Mail, Forbes, etc.) fanning the flames further.   Nestle’s facebook manager got peeved, and started to answer back.

“Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

And after deleting posts:

“Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.”

Which outraged the public further.  Viewings of the film soared – from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions.

The orangutan flipped Nestle’s purchasing practices

Remember Unilever?  The single largest buyer of palm oil in the world?  As soon as the campaign went live for them, they made commitments – and the story never broke.  So their reputation is intact, and their public relations strong. Nestle, which is a much smaller user of palm oil, has now “established Responsible Sourcing Guidelines and has committed to ensuring that its products do not have a deforestation footprint” – for all their products, not just palm oil and not just KitKat.
To guarantee progress, they have signed up with The Forest Trust (TFT), an independent NGO, and note that they are building further partnerships “to build a global movement to support the development, implementation and disclosure of sustainable forestry practices. We have joined a coalition calling for a moratorium on rainforest destruction for palm oil in Indonesia and have become an active member of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).”.

The right thing to do.  But at what a cost…

..and gave the public the last laugh

Greenpeace created the conditions for a good story.  But Nestle created the story.  And shot itself neatly in each foot.
Which tells us that people are more interested in being able to see what you’re doing, than they are in the impacts of what you’re actually doing – or even the orangutans for that matter.

Try to control the subject as they might, Nestle couldn’t.  And the speed with which the internet, twitter, facebook and e-mail spread the word, meant that the situation escalated faster and with greater fury than the company could manage.

Getting it Right.

Let’s contrast that with 7th Generation – an all natural eco-groovy brand of green cleaners and hygiene products in North America.
Some years ago Jeffrey Hollander, 7th Generation’s CEO, took a gamble. He told his sales manager:

I want to put everything that is bad about our products on the internet.

The Sales Manager was aghast.  Surely you must be joking? He said.  Next time I go to a customer they’ll be all over me about this negative information.  And sure enough, competitors made sure that buyers had all the information about what was wrong about 7th Generation’s products.

And a funny thing happened.

The buyers said to the competitors, “yeah, thanks for this..  Now show us the same for your products.”  Some of the competitors scrambled to get the information, provided it, and looked worse.  And most of them didn’t, and started to lose sales.

Today, Walmart announced it would start carrying Seventh Generation products in it’s US stores.  “We’re not just putting [Seventh Generation's] products on the shelf,” says Al Dominguez, Wal-Mart’s vice president of household chemicals and paper goods. “We want their help in developing a category that’s more sustainable.”  (From the Wall Street Journal)

Trust builds sales

Transparency built trust with the buyers – and kept the bar high for competitors.

The point is that for transparency to work FOR you, you have to lead.  If you’re number two, or three, or ten, you have to do all the work anyway – but you don’t get the credit.  It’s the difference between making CSR costly, or making CSR profitable.

Your call.