CorpComms Magazine

Everyone knows fashion is fickle - and, for companies, that can be a double-edged sword. Judge social trends and public attitudes correctly and you can add phenomenal value to your brand and corporate identity at negligible cost. Get it wrong, however, and you can be cast as a social pariah, wrecking years of careful brand building.

The difficulty is that fashions are not always ephemeral. Some last for long periods of time, offering opportunities for iconic brand marketing with image-conscious young spenders, before being abruptly abandoned. The best recent example is the humble plastic carrier bag.

Thirty years ago, putting a corporate brand on a carrier bag meant more than just free advertising. In the beginning, plastic bags cost money and customers were actually required to pay for the privilege of walking around like human sandwich boards. With climate change racing up the agenda, however, the risk and reward scenario of issuing free carrier bags is quickly reversing.

If environmental campaigners have their way, leaving the house with the wrong kind of plastic might soon prove as embarrassing as wearing flares in the late 1970s when everyone else had switched to drainpipes. If your company's name is on that carrier bag, it could be even more damaging - the potential ethical and CSR consequences are far worse than being shunned by the prom queen at the school disco.

Beginning of the end

The question is: how did this happen? The answer has much to do with We Are What We Do, a project devised by Community Links, an inner city charity operating in east London. Three years ago We Are What We Do published a book called Change the world for a fiver, containing 100 simple, everyday consumer actions aimed at improving the environment, health and communities. The book became a best-seller and spawned a global movement with more than 500,000 registered actions by its followers.

We Are What We Do, which gives 65 percent of its profits to community initiatives, worked to encourage some of the actions it suggested in the publication. It chose action number one in the book - decline plastic bags - as its first campaign, and immediately tapped into the zeitgeist.

Landfill, recycling and energy consumption increasingly top the consumer agenda and consumers are voting with their feet for companies that show they care, making plastic carrier bags increasingly hard to defend. In Ireland, six months after the government introduced a tax of 15 cents per plastic bag in Each of the estimated 10 bn plastic bags used every year by UK consumers will take between 400 and 1,000 years to decompose. Only one in 200 plastic bags is recycled, and the average UK consumer gets through 167 plastic bags every year - most of which end up in landfill sites.

Eighteen months ago, We Are What We Do teamed up with fashion designer Anya Hindmarch to create reusable bags emblazoned with the slogan 'I'm Not A Plastic Bag'. The impact was far greater than anyone at the organisation could have dreamed of.

'This was an issue that was bubbling under the surface; we identified it - but at the time it was an incredible risk for us to take,' recalls Vicki Anstey, head of marketing and sales at We Are What We Do. 'We produced 30,000 of the bags at a cost of £4.75 per bag and sold them for £5 apiece through Anya Hindmarch, our own website and Sainsbury's stores. There was a massive frenzy for the bags - we were completely overwhelmed.'

Just say no

 Indeed some shoppers actually queued through the night before April 25, when a batch of 20,000 bags was made available in Sainsbury's stores from 8 am. Now the company is launching a second phase of the campaign under the banner 'Plastic Ain't My Bag'. It is launching new bags in a wider range of colours at £7.50 each this time, selling 15,000 of them through its website. It is also taking the concept to Japan, Canada and America.

We Are What We Do has created 'The art of saying no', an assertiveness course aimed at helping consumers to decline bags, and has come up with an 'A-Z of bag activism'. It is also working with retailers to urge them to get 'drastic around plastic', measuring the number of bags its followers decline using an online tracker and staging a community day in Stratford, east London, to promote the issue.

The campaign is making speedy progress. A recent agreement by UK retailers, including Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Asda and Sainsbury's, is expected to cut the environmental impact of plastic bags by a quarter before 2009, reducing CO2 emissions by up to 58,500 tons a year - the equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the road.

In June Tesco began to offer online delivery customers the option of having their goods delivered in green trays rather than plastic bags as one of a number of projects aimed at saving the supermarket group 1 bn carrier bags a year. Customers who choose this option also receive Green Clubcard points.

Tesco says the programme is aimed at helping customers make a 'positive environmental choice'. 'Home delivery without plastic carrier bags is a winner with our customers - and the environment,' says Tesco.com chief executive Laura Wade- Gery. 'This is just the latest step in the work we are doing to minimise our impact on the environment and help our customers do the same.'

Everlasting bags

During a 10-day period in June, 14 M&S stores in Northern Ireland gave away 'bags for life', designed by illustrator David Downton and made from 100 percent recycled materials, with each food purchase. When worn out, the bags, which usually cost 10p, will be replaced free of charge and recycled.

From July 1, M&S will charge customers in its Northern Ireland stores 5p for each plastic bag used. The money raised will be donated to Groundwork Northern Ireland, which funds projects that address environmental issues. Plastic bag recycling facilities will also be introduced in the stores.

If the trial is successful, M&S is considering rolling it out across its other stores. The experiment follows a change in the production process of all M&S' UK bags in April, which resulted in them being made from 100 percent recycled post-consumer waste, thereby reducing the amount of virgin plastic used each year by 2,000 tonnes - equivalent to the weight of the Space Shuttle. 'What we're doing is part of one of our commitments from our 'Plan A' initiative, which pledges to reduce carrier bag usage by a third and send no waste to landfill by 2012,' explains Clare Wilkes, corporate PR manager at M&S. 'It's a really important part of our CSR programme. We believe it's one of the ways we can make a big difference.

We want to help break the addiction to plastic carrier bags.' Chemist chain Superdrug is issuing 20 percent fewer bags because people are not asking for them as much. It also launched a recyclable cotton shopper, priced at £2.99, last year. Adorned with 'tag, you're It', the stock of 50,000 sold out just days after pictures appeared of model Kate Moss carrying one.

Sainsbury's, which has already introduced new plastic bags comprising 33 percent recycled materials, last month committed to two days where the only bags it distributed in its stores were bags for life. In May Waitrose trialled a fast-track till in 14 stores that was for customers with reusable bags only, while shoppers at Waitrose's Saffron Walden store were expected to provide their own bags, whether recycled plastic ones from a previous shopping expedition or the store's own bags for life, over the same two-week period.

The Saffron Walden branch was chosen following research by Waitrose that found shoppers in the area were most likely to use its in-store plastic bag recycling facility: 90 percent were in favour of the trial. Waitrose slashed the number of single-use bags distributed last year by 54 mn, but it still hands out 250 mn a year.

Nick Monger-Godf rey, head of social responsibility at Waitrose, says the firm will analyse customers' reactions to 'determine pragmatic and realistic ways of making our business even greener'. At Asda, if customers bring back five plastic carrier bags, they receive a free bag for life.

And in May, Modbury in South Devon followed the lead of San Francisco and banned plastic bags from its shops. None of the town's 43 traders now use plastic bags and more than 60 towns in the UK have been in contact for advice about launching similar schemes.

People power

Anstey says the campaign stems from We Are What We Do's belief that it is people, not governments, who change society. For example, the Modbury bag ban was suggested by local wildlife photographer Rebecca Hosking, after filming a BBC documentary about the devastating effect of plastic bags on marine life in Hawaii.

'Our role in this campaign is not to lecture or chide customers,' says Anstey. 'It is to champion and support them, measure their triumphs, mitigate their difficulties and make the occasional irreverent suggestion from the sidelines. We're just asking them whether they really need a bag and we're asking retailers to get their staff to ask them this at the checkouts, too. 'It is almost a status symbol sometimes for people to walk along Oxford Street with four or five bags, but they are entirely unnecessary. Our aim is to make plastic bags a thing of the past, and really uncool. We want carrying a plastic bag to be as uncool as wearing fur.'

Alastair Eperon, managing director of reputation management consultancy Eperon Consulting, says: 'This one will run and run because in the long term it provides genuine benefit to all stakeholder s: retailers save lots of money, consumers applaud and comply, and the environment wins. It's very noticeable the number of large and small retailers that have now trained their staff to ask customers whether they want a bag and, anecdotally, how many customers are rejecting bags when they are automatically provided.'

Tipping point

Andrew Pharoah, head of corporate communications at public relations agency Hill & Knowlton, agrees. 'The issue of waste is fast reaching a tipping point,' he notes. 'In an environment where local authorities are fundamentally changing how they approach domestic refuse, the issuing of free carrier bags is a very obvious target.

'Large sections of the public are increasingly open to change. Companies in the retail sector have seen both a means of reducing cost and improving their environmental performance while simultaneously helping to 'green' their brand and drive brand preference. There is clearly an early-mover advantage but over time it will become mainstream and, before too long, simply expected.'

Anstey is confident the campaign will have a pronounced effect. 'Behaviour is viral, and we humans learn quickly,' she points out. 'In Bangladesh, Zanzibar and Taiwan, they haven't had plastic bags for years and everyone is bearing up just fine. In Ireland and Denmark they introduced a tax on plastic bags and nobody died. It's worth remembering plastic bags have only been around since 1977. We managed before.' 2002, their use had been slashed by 90 percent, and 3.5 mn had been raised to invest in environmental projects.

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