If what we buy is what we are, then we might just be getting better, according to Duncan Goose, the creator of the philanthropic consumer brand One. Goose believes that there is a seismic shift in consumption building up, where companies’ core values are as – if not more - important than their products.
“We are right at the infancy of a step change in consumer behaviour,” Goose told the Huffington Post UK in an interview.
At the heart of the shift is a new breed of consumer: Generation G. They are far less motivated by brands and products than their antecedents and more closely identify with ideals and values – this is the generation that spawned the Occupy movement and Toms Shoes and that elevates Ben and Jerry’s and Innocent Smoothies over Haagen Daas and Pepsi.
They still consume, but they expect their consumption to be creative. They need to know that their bananas are Fairtrade, and they know what Fairtrade means. They need to believe that when they buy water, someone in the developing world gets the same. When they buy toilet paper, someone in a third world country gets access to sanitation.
“It’s a psychographic, rather than a demographic shift. It’s a mindset change,” Goose said from his office in central London.
“If you look at people graduating from university now, they’re not really questioning what a product does but where it comes from and how it behaves.”
Goose is hoping that these consumers will take the same approach to financial services – with money going to microfinance in the developing world – or pharmaceutical and healthcare products, as he looks to expand the One brand.
He went through the Damascene conversion required of social entrepreneurs while driving a motorbike around the world on a two-year sabbatical from a role in business development at JWT in London, where he had been marketing everything from condoms to financial products.
“I came back two years later not a hippy wanting to save the world,” he said. “I love business. I wanted to do business.”
Goose went back into marketing, but “something had happened” on the way, and, in 2004, in a pub, the idea behind One Water was born.
“We said there are a billion people in the world without access to clean water, why don’t we launch a bottled water brand and give all the money away. And as a bunch of drunk marketeers that sounded like a really good idea.”
The idea that developed was compelling – buying one bottle of water would have a direct, easily explained connection to a social cause. This like-for-like model now underpins the entire One strategy.
“If you buy a bottle of water then we can directly give water in developing countries; if you buy toilet tissues then we can give people sanitation facilities; if we buy X you get Y,” he said. “There’s always this like-for-like connectivity.”
Even so, entering a crowded, £1.5bn market with a business which gives all of its profits away seemed quixotic at best – except that bottled water is essentially a brand-led market. As Goose said, “It’s the same stuff in different packaging.”
“It’s fundamentally a commoditised market, there had been no innovation in the market since the days of Perrier. All that would happen is a brand would come out with a slightly different label or a slightly different shaped bottle. At best you got a sports cap on the top. It didn’t go a lot beyond that.”
Creating something which differentiated itself by its behaviour after its sale meant that the brand could carve out a niche amongst those Gen-G consumers.
Goose took some inspiration from an old staple of philanthropic consumerism, Newman’s Own – the sauce brand fronted by the actor Paul Newman – though he admitted that getting it off the ground has been “very bloody difficult” and “like trying to run a business with one hand tied behind my back.”
He needed, he added, an understanding bank manager.
“I’m quite bloody minded about stuff,” he said. “When I said I was going to create this brand and enter the bottled water market, which is a £1.5bn market dominated by three companies and give away all the money, [my friends] said ‘you’re just a f***ing fruitloop’.
“It cost me pretty much everything to prove them wrong.
“I just said, look, I just want to prove that I can create a bottled water brand. And then if I can do that, can I sell a bottle? If I can sell a bottle, can I sell enough bottles to change one person’s life? And then, if I can change one person’s life, can I change a family? And if I can change a family, can I change a community?”
Since then, Global Ethics, the company behind the brand, has branched out into producing toilet tissue, vitamin water and soap. Global Ethics Investments, the associated licensing company, has licensed the One brand to other enterprises, including Noble Foods, Frank Roberts and Morning Foods, to produce eggs, bread and porridge, respectively, all with a like-for-like connection to the developing world.
At the end of 2011, the company had given away more than £7.6m in profits. In the summer, at the height of a devastating drought and famine in East Africa, Global Ethics donated £1m to causes in the region.
The product range is set to expand, with inspiration coming from both the social end and the commercial side. Banking and financial products lend themselves to a like-for-like connection to microfinance initiatives, which promote development by offering credit to kick-start small enterprise.
On the flip side, sometimes the innovation comes from the need. In the Global Ethics office, Goose shows a box of children’s plasters, designed by British schoolchildren - the winner of a contest to find a product that links up with paediatric medicine.
Other brands have tried, with varying degrees of success, like-for-like style donations with their products. While not dismissive of them, Goose is certainly sceptical of their credentials.
Big consumer brands have started to throw their weight behind corporate philanthropy and giving, from Coke buying land in the Arctic to Danone partnering with the Grameen to offer child nutrition products in Bangladesh, to Puma publishing the ecological impact of its supply chain.
This trend is in part due to an evolving understanding of sustainability, and in part because they have one eye on the emergence of gen-G.
What sets Global Ethics and the One brand apart is that rather than using philanthropy to add to a marketing message, the company’s stated purpose is to improve lives – the bottle is just the mechanism – which is why it just might have lasting appeal for the savvy and sceptical gen-G consumer.
“If our job as a bottled water company is to change people’s lives, and a billion people in the world don’t have access to clean water, how long would it take you to do that?” Goose asked. “The answer is it wouldn’t happen in one lifetime, or my children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime because we’d never be big enough.
“But if you looked at the global bottled water industry and said if everybody joined in the cause, how long would it take? I worked out that if every bottled water company in the world did what we did, we’d solve the problem in 21 weeks because of the amount of money generated,” he said.
“We could then close the bottled water company down.”