April 9, 2013 17

Greenwashing or genuine effort?

By in Ethics/sustainability


H&M’s Conscious Actions report. H&M want to provide fashion for conscious customers, as opposed to ones in a coma.

The situation is probably the same in a lot of places, but in London at the moment, you can’t really walk a block without seeing roughly 18,000 H&M Conscious Collection ad posters. My eyeballs almost exploded with the centrifugal force due to the speed and frequency at which they rolled. Luckily I have tough eyeballs, mainly from rolling them so much. But I’m a skeptic, not a cynic, so I gave H&M a chance: I went on their website to find out more about the Conscious Collection and the company’s efforts to be more environmentally and ethically aware.

Obviously, I didn’t realise I was signing myself up for reading a 95-page PDF of H&M’s collective “conscious” efforts, the Conscious Actions Sustainability Report 2012. That’s almost a hundred pages of H&M trying to bowl you over with repetitive information (seriously, the number of different ways they managed to phrase the fact that 148 partners produce 53% of H&M’s products…) and dazzle you with as many pretty graphs as humanly possible before Adobe Illustrator can’t bear it anymore and dies from exhaustion.

Anyway, here is an assortment of my thoughts, because there’s no way I can think of to approach this massively unwieldy document in a systematic way. I suppose this is an exercise in critical thinking more than anything, to demonstrate that it’s necessary to approach this kind of information critically – your approach could easily make a difference to the message you take away.

•   The PDF contained a lot of information, both useful and not so useful, about all the efforts H&M is making to be more “conscious”. They clearly have made a fair amount of effort to try to address some problems, and a lot of their efforts are admirable and probably far above the efforts made by a lot of other brands. But my general impression from reading the document was that in a lot of respects they don’t seem to be committed in much of a practical, quantifiable way – there’s a distinct lack of clearly defined goals and deadlines (made all the more apparent because a few of their initiatives do have distinct goals and deadlines). I got a bit sick of the weasel-worded sentiments of being committed to change, to valuing improvement, to having a vision of a sustainable business. Having a vision doesn’t necessarily translate to practical change. I’m sure there are people in H&M management who really do care about improving the company’s practices, but the changes that need to be made are largely ones that would require a total restructuring of the company’s business model. The cost of the necessary changes means that the issues are unlikely to ever be seriously and comprehensively addressed – not while there are shareholders who want increasing returns on their investments.

•   Looking at the data presented, less than half of H&M’s supplier factories are in compliance with requirements for young workers. They don’t actually describe what that means, so I had to look it up in a different document. Apparently “requirements for young workers” means that workers under the age of 18 are working under legal conditions. So even though H&M supplier factories are 100% compliant with not using child labour, there are still plenty of people under the age of 18 who are working under illegal conditions. While it’s great that H&M is making efforts to improve this, it should never at any point been accepted as part of their production line. (Or as they seem intent on calling it in a weirdly euphemistic way, the “value chain”.).

•   Other data say that 72% of supplier factories are compliant with chemical handling requirements. That means that almost 30% of factories could be exposing any number of their employees to dangerous chemical handling practices. That could translate to potentially thousands of people being unnecessarily exposed to chemicals so other people in the world can have some cheap clothes. That doesn’t really seem, you know, ethical. But phrasing this information in terms of percentages, rather than the actual number of people who are affected, certainly is a way of downplaying what is kind of a horrifying statistic.

•   Something that I found kind of lol-worthy was the report’s effort to emphasise the fact that 62% of supplier factory workers are female, like this is some sort of triumph for gender equality. There are reasons why so many women end up having to work in garment factories, and it is generally not because they’re so incredibly empowered and liberated.

•   Overtime was identified as a problem. Keep in mind, this sort of “overtime” is not racking up a few extra hours per week – Lucy Siegle’s examples have been more like working multiple consecutive 20-hour shifts to meet deadlines (although the overtime problem that H&M identifies could cover a huge range of overtime durations and patterns). Anyway, although H&M identified this as a problem, I think they did some backflips to try to displace the responsibility for this issue – it’s because of inefficiency, they say; and it’s because workers want to work more so they can get more income, etc. However, I would argue that reducing overtime significantly is to a large extent incompatible with H&M’s business model. If you want fast turn around on huge numbers of garments so that you can keep up with micro-trends and you can re-stock popular items ASAP when they sell out, you are putting the onus on the manufacturers to get a huge amount of work done as fast as possible. H&M does acknowledge that “overtime remains a core issue in our industry” but to me that sounds a little bit like some more blame-dispersion – it’s the whole industry, man! You can’t blame just us when the entire industry is like this!

•   A big deal is also made about H&M’s efforts to improve fire safety, which is obviously a critical issue given the number of factory fire-related deaths. The results they’ve reported really just highlight again the problem with the whole system in general – H&M’s manufacturing needs are enormous and are outsourced to hundreds of factories that aren’t owned by H&M and that have no guarantee of adequate safety precautions and facilities. H&M audits identified poor-quality materials, poor maintenance and lack of proper electrician training as problems in the factories. Their suggested solution? Stricter legislation and more inspections. Maybe I’m just being dumb when I think that maybe H&M, the company with the billion dollar profits, could foot the bill for installing safe electrical systems in the factories they choose to involve in their production lines. Government legislation might help in the future, more inspections might improve things a bit, but neither of those things puts quality electrical wiring in factories in the first place. H&M seems to think they’ve done a great job, though, because 109,400 of their workers have received fire safety training – a pretty low-cost thing to do, since it could just mean staging some seminars or showing some videos. Hopefully it will save lives, if people know more about what to do in the event of a fire, but I’m not sure it’s going to solve the problem. Plenty of workers can probably identify potentially dangerous situations, but that’s not going to prevent the dangerous situations from arising in a system that emphasises cost reduction.

•   I was interested to find that despite the huge energy costs of manufacturing products, apparently the greatest amount of energy used by H&M is in running their actual stores. They have a nice goal of aiming to reduce electricity use in their stores by 20% per square metre by 2020 (relative to a 2007 baseline). Well, that sounds good until you consider the fact that H&M are planning on open 325 new stores in the 2012/2013 financial year alone (ref). I think it would be safe to assume that if you open hundreds of new stores every year, there will be a net increase in energy usage by the company, despite these efforts to decrease electricity use per square metre. Not really helping the environment, per se, but at least it’ll cut down their electricity bill.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. I could go into a lot more, but it’s all pretty much in the same vein – efforts are being made, but if you think about it, so many of the problems will probably persist because they’re simply consequences of the business model that needs incredibly high-volume production for incredibly low prices and at incredibly fast speeds. It’s simply a model that does more damage than it needs to, just because apparently someone somewhere really needs tops for £1.99?

(Disclaimer: as always, there are people whose financial situations are such that they really do need clothing prices to be as low as possible in order for them to be able to clothe themselves and their families, but that is not the primary group of people contributing to H&M’s massive profits.)

Overall, it appears that the entire point of H&M’s Conscious document is to convey the fact that the company is making efforts to change and to improve their practices. I mean, it is genuinely good that they are making efforts to implement change. However, most of the problems arise from the fast turn-around and cheap costs demanded by the fast fashion business model. The problems that have come about are often part and parcel of that business model, but should never have been allowed to be – dangerous and illegal working conditions and environmentally irresponsible production processes should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, so the efforts to reduce these hardly seem worthy of congratulation and aren’t necessarily indicative of a company that genuinely wants to minimise its negative impact. To use a random analogy, if you burn a bunch of people’s houses down, you shouldn’t really expect to be praised for making efforts to try to burn fewer houses down.

April 4, 2013 22

A bit of bad news for budgeting

By in Theory/research

Ah, the sweet smell of conventional wisdom being burned to ashes by empirical research.

It is generally accepted that, when you go out shopping for something, having a budget in mind is a Very Good Idea. It’s not the amount you’re absolutely, stringently limited to – not like your limit is $50 because you only have $50 in your bank account – but it’s the amount that you are willing to pay for what you want, various factors considered. It might be an absolute maximum (e.g. nothing above $100) or it might be a general target range (e.g. something around $20-30), but either way, you’re using a self-imposed price restraint to limit what you spend. Yay, budgets and responsible spending!

Hmm, too bad that that sort of approach actually seems to increase what you spend.

In the paper ‘When budgeting backfires: How self-imposed price restraints can increase spending’ (2012), authors Larson and Hamilton report that across six experiments they consistently found that self-imposing a budget when making a purchase decision caused people to have an increased preference for higher-priced items, regardless of whether the budget was an absolute maximum or a general target range.

It seems that imposing a price restraint draws your attention to that general price range and you tend to ignore items whose prices are too far away from the value you’ve decided on. For example, you might say you don’t want to pay more than $100 for a pair of jeans. However, setting that maximum price restraint causes you to ignore the options with considerably lower prices, so you might ignore a $60 pair of jeans, whereas if you hadn’t set a budget you might have considered the $60 pair (and they might’ve turned out to be exactly what you wanted). Just by setting a budget, you’re kind of putting blinkers on and only paying attention to a restricted range of items that are reasonably close to your price restraint. Unfortunately, this restricted range of items then goes on to warp your judgement of the items’ prices and quality.

The experiments showed that there was a scaling effect on perceived quality of that more restricted range of items, because when you restrict your appraisal to a smaller range with less context, it makes the differences between the items in that small range seem bigger. The consequence of this is that the lowest quality item suddenly seems much more low quality than it otherwise would have, and that in turn leads you to prefer the higher quality items in your small range. And what does higher quality mean? Somewhat loosely and generally, it means higher prices. (And it is rather loosely and generally true, if that graph I’ve previously posted is anything to go by).

The selection of that small range of items also means that prices become less meaningful. If you’ve set your budget to $100, and you’ve ended up with several pairs of jeans to choose from that are all in the $90-100 price range, then the price isn’t going to make much difference. You’re going to be paying around $100, give or take a bit, so price isn’t particularly informative for making that decision – none of the prices is that radically different from what your initial budget of $100. As a result, you go back to making a decision, as best you can, based on quality. And as I said above, the differences in quality seem greater in that restricted range of items, and you end up preferring the better quality items, which on average means higher prices.

As always, there are a lot of other factors to consider (how well a person can evaluate quality, how much emphasis a person places on quality vs. aesthetic value, how well quality and price correlate in different groups of consumable goods such as clothes or food or electronics or furniture, etc). Still, it seems like a pretty robust finding – price restraints unfortunately seem to draw your attention to a higher price range and then mess with it while it’s there.

But how do you counteract the apparent “costs” of having a budget? Not having a budget doesn’t seem like a better alternative to having a budget, but as the authors of the paper speculate, there’s a wider context of budgeting that’s more encouraging. If you plan your spending in general, keep track of your earnings and expenditures, and engage in some thoughtful and practical budget-planning and monitoring, you’ll probably still come out on top, regardless of a pair of slightly-more-expensive-than-necessary-or-intended jeans. Need some motivation/inspiration? Check out what Lin has to say about her approach to budgeting. Otherwise? I don’t know, STAY OUT OF THE GODDAMN SHOPS?

April 1, 2013 8

Implicit associations

By in Theory/research

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an intriguing thing. You might have heard of it, since Harvard has been running a pretty high-profile project using variations of the test for a while now, and the assortment of results certainly gives some food for thought from both psychological and sociological perspectives. The IAT is designed to test the associations that you make between things. These associations are implicit because they can even run contrary to your explicit opinions – they’re associations that your brain makes that you might not even be consciously aware of.

The overall idea is that when you have to process information about things that you implicitly don’t associate with each other, you’ll be slower at it than when you process information about things you do implicitly associate with each other. For example, you might be slower to respond to the word combination of “science/female” than to “science/male” because you might have the implicit association that science is more of a male thing. This doesn’t mean you’re a horrible, sexist pig and that I need to find you and punch you in the back of the head – it could easily be because of cultural and social influence that you’ve come to associate “science” with “male” more so than with “female”. You can be the world’s most super-informed, acutely passionate third-wave feminist and still have that implicit bias against “science/female”. (Or you could be that horrible, sexist pig who contributes to the cultural perpetuation of such gender stereotypes and you do need that punch in the back of the head, but I get the feeling that such a person is unlikely to be found among the readership of this blog.)

Anyway, the point is that using the IAT is a good way to understand what might be going on in people’s brains in a way that you couldn’t achieve just by asking “So how do you feel about this?”. (Disclaimer: there are plenty of caveats that go with using the IAT, which are more or less summed up here, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

As you might imagine, the test is pretty interesting to use in the consumer setting and it can present a novel view of how products or marketing or whatever might affect your implicit attitudes towards brands, behaviours, etc. That is something that Ratliff et al. investigated in their paper, ‘Does one bad apple(juice) spoil the bunch? Implicit attitudes toward one product transfer to other products by the same brand’. (I don’t know if the title came before the choice of using apple juice in the study, or the other way around, but we scientists do endeavour at all opportunities to shoehorn fantastic and/or terrible puns into our paper titles. I haven’t achieved it personally, but for example this paper makes me affectionately roll my eyes each time I cite it in one of my manuscripts.)

In Ratliff et al.’s study, they wanted to examine people’s attitudes towards products from the same brand, and how your attitude towards one product from a particular brand spills over to affect your attitude towards other products from that brand. In the first part of the study, the researchers wanted to check that you get this kind of spill-over effect, where having a positive attitude about one of the brand’s items positively affects your appraisal of other items from the same brand.

This was indeed the case – in the study, if people had a positive attitude towards a moisturising lotion of Brand A and a negative attitude towards a moisturing lotion of Brand B, and were then presented with totally neutral and equivalent descriptions of a deodorant from Brand A and a deodorant from Brand B, they of course preferred the Brand A deodorant, even though the information they had about the two deodorants was ostensibly identical. So far, so unsurprising, and in this case there was implicit and explicit attitude transfer, with participants preferring the deodorant of the positively perceived brand both when tested with the IAT and when filling out a scale to rate how they felt about the deodorants.

But of course, we wouldn’t be evaluating that deodorant in a vacuum, so to speak – we usually have some degree of positive or negative information about a product already, like whether it contains ingredients we’d prefer to avoid or whether its quality doesn’t seem all that great or whether it ticks all the boxes we want it to. So what happens when you like one product from a brand, and then have to evaluate another product, which either seems good or not so good? Does that pre-existing positive attitude about a brand’s product influence your evaluation of that other product? Does liking that one other item from the brand mean that you perhaps evaluate a bad product more positively than you otherwise would have?

To start with, participants read information about taste tests and were thus induced to have a positive attitude towards Brand A of apple juice and a negative attitude towards Brand B of apple juice. Participants then evaluated orange juices by these brands based on written descriptions of taste tests, the results of those taste tests being either positive or negative.

The results? When attitude to Brand A apple juice was positive, and then positive information about Brand A orange juice was presented (and negative information about Brand B orange juice was presented), participants explicitly preferred Brand A orange juice over Brand B. When attitude to Brand A apple juice was positive, but negative information about Brand A orange juice was presented (and positive information about Brand B orange juice was presented), participants explicitly preferred Brand B orange juice over Brand A. So even though Brand A’s apple juice was great, participants didn’t let it colour their appraisal of how Brand A’s orange juice was kind of crap.

The interesting thing here is that these explicit preferences do not match up with participants’ implicit preferences. When attitude to Brand A apple juice was positive, and Brand A orange juice was presented as kind of crap (and Brand B orange juice as kind of good), people still implicitly preferred Brand A orange juice. Their attitude towards the apple juice was colouring their appraisal of the orange juice by the same brand, even though they seemed to know at a more explicit level that they shouldn’t let their judgement be swayed like that.

That’s the power of liking a brand’s product – to some extent, at some level below conscious awareness, your brain is still saying that the brand’s other products must be good, even in the face of negative information about those other products.

We can’t know from this study whether these implicit biases have particular consequences or behavioural outcomes (e.g. does having this implicit bias mean that people are more likely to actually buy the crap product, or would the explicit attitudes prevail when it comes to making that purchase decision?) and there are plenty of other factors to consider when interpreting the results (e.g. the results might very likely be different if the participants formed their own attitudes rather than getting them by reading about other people’s opinions from taste tests).

But… god, it’s really interesting to consider, isn’t it? I feel like that’s something that could very well have affected my purchasing habits before. One example that springs to mind is a shirt I bought from Claudie Pierlot when I was in Paris. Well, I bought two Claudie Pierlot shirts in Paris. That was about 18 months ago, and one of the shirts (the blue one) is still in beautiful condition and I wear it very frequently, whereas the other (the white one) got some severe seam slippage on the sleeves after a few wears and therefore became unwearable. How do I feel about Claudie Pierlot shirts? Well, trying to think as honestly and frankly as possible… I think I would buy another one. I don’t need another shirt, but if all my shirts spotaneously disintegrated, I think I would still consider a Claudie Pierlot replacement. Is that because I’ve been sufficiently influenced by the positive attitude I have towards that blue shirt? It’s impossible to tell (and obviously there are a lot of other factors at play besides my attitude towards the blue shirt or the brand), but it’s something to keep in mind for the future. Especially if all my shirts spontaneously disintegrate.

March 22, 2013 7

Oh hello there

By in Theory/research


Artwork by René Gruau for Le Rouge Baiser.

Haha, oh, well, that’s awkward.

Just as I decide to re-focus this blog a little more closely on the empirical research behind consumption, the relationship between consumption and happiness or fulfillment, what factors play a role in inducing us to buy, what things influence consumer choices, and the wider issues associated with consumption (all this as opposed to whinging about my 14kg of excess clothing)… I discover a site that’s already doing that. And has been doing it for a while. And is actually a project by a research lab in San Francisco. And I found them while trying to track down a paper I wanted to blog about and their blog entry on the paper was one of the first search results I got. Wow.

How have I been writing my blog for over a year yet have been unaware of that other blog’s existence? Apparently I’m in the wrong section of the series of internet tubes and it isn’t particularly well connected to the section the other blog is in. Silly, hopeless tubes.

Anyway, the site is called Beyond the Purchase and you can find their blog here. The well-populated archives are comprised of posts that discuss plenty of very interesting research papers and findings. Back on the main website, they have some questionnaire scales that assess various factors that influence your own buying habits, so maybe register and have a go at some of those and see what you find out about yourself that you might not have explicitly known (I haven’t personally because I am all scaled out from my PhD thesis).

Small but interesting but ultimately inconsequential fact: the first blog post on Beyond the Purchase was on January 27, 2012 – nine days before the first post here on Empty Emptor. Beaten to the punch, apparently! But the more the merrier, of course.

March 16, 2013 23

Brand attachment and judging ethical behaviour

By in Ethics/sustainability, Theory/research

I’ve written previously about the gap that seems to exist between consumers’ ethical values and consumers’ actual, practical application those ethical values. Even though a lot of us would like to buy in a more ethical and sustainable way, when it comes down to it, we sometimes (or perhaps frequently) don’t. Of course, there are plenty of factors that affect whether we enact our desire to consume more responsibly – the availability of sustainable items, the cost (relative to alternative items and relative to one’s own budget), the quality and range of more responsible options, etc.

Another thing that affects purchasing in general is, of course, brand attachment. Attachment in this context results in brand loyalty and commitment and willingness to pay higher prices to obtain that brand’s products. This is what pretty much every company and brand will be aiming for, so you can be sure that they’re doing what they can to facilitate brand attachment. How attached you are to a brand depends on the affective experiences it offers you (so what emotions it induces in you) and brand characteristics (for example, whether it seems to share values with you, whether it seems to have a brand personality that matches yours, etc.), among other things. But what are the consequences of being attached to a brand? Well, one of them, as investigated by Schmalz and Orth (2012), is how brand attachment influences people’s reactions to unethical behaviour by the company, firm or brand they’re attached to.

It’s easy enough to assume that brand attachment would influence a person’s judgement or perception of unethical behaviour by that brand, but, ah! You can’t really say whether it’s correct until you’ve empirically tested it, so at this point science steps in to quantify exactly what the effects are of brand attachment.

Does brand attachment shelter brands from negative publicity? Are brand devotees willing to overlook unethical behaviour, and if they are, to what extent? It’s interesting to think about these questions, given the pretty frequent media reports of such relevant occurrences of unethical behaviour. The examples in Schmalz and Orth’s paper include when Nokia moved one of their production facilities from Germany to Romania to take advantage of cheaper labour (and German consumers got rid of their Nokia phones in protest); when Apple was exposed as having used covert video recording of employees in an attempt to reduce theft; and when it was found out that suppliers were plucking live geese to obtain down for a range of Ikea products. There are endless other such occurrences that spring to mind, including the frequent reports of lethal factory fires and abysmal work conditions in the production lines for fashion chains such as H&M, Topshop, Zara and others. Obviously there are plenty of cognitive biases to help us deal with the cognitive dissonance of buying from brands even when we strongly disapprove of their actions, but what role does brand attachment play?

The researchers were interested in the extent to which brand attachment influenced consumer judgement, so they wanted to have two different levels of “unethical” behaviour – moderately unethical and highly unethical – and to see if brand attachment influenced judgement of the unethical behaviour differently between the two levels. What’s the difference between moderately and highly unethical behaviour, you ask? In this study, moderately unethical behaviour was when a brand engaged in negative behaviour but then offered some sort of compensation, whereas highly unethical behaviour was when the brand engaged in negative behaviour and didn’t offer compensation. This is one of the hypothetical example scenarios from the paper:

Coca-Cola has announced intentions to build a new plant. Space for the new plant will be allocated from a local nature reserve. While the German Society for Nature Conservation (NABU) has voiced strong concern about likely damage to the breeding grounds of red-listed white stork, Coca-Cola emphasizes that it will bring 2000 new jobs to the economically underdeveloped region.

Moderately unethical scenario:
To assuage project opponents, Coca-Cola states that even more jobs will be created in the near future through a projected increase in the plant’s output over the next years.

Highly unethical scenario:
Opponents of the project argue that the net job creation will be zero as Coca-Cola merely shifts production from one region to another.

Now opinions of whether those two scenarios really are moderately and highly unethical, respectively, will vary hugely, but overall what the researchers were interested in was the difference between the moderately unethical scenario and the highly unethical scenario. So even if you personally thought that neither scenario was particularly unethical, or both were highly unethical, it’s still likely that you’d evaluate the second one more negatively than the first one.

And unsurprisingly, it turns out that brand attachment does shield a brand from negative evaluation from consumers, but only when behaviour is moderately unethical – not when it is highly unethical and without any mitigating circumstances. So when you’re strongly attached to a brand and they do something moderately unethical, you don’t judge them as harshly as someone who is only weakly attached to the brand. However, when the brand does something highly unethical, strongly attached people judge them just as harshly as weakly attached people. Developing customer loyalty therefore softens the blow for brands when they do something generally considered to be moderately unethical, but it won’t protect them if they do something objectively awful.

However, there’s another factor at play here that probably makes an immeasurely huge difference – the country of the people in the study and the country where the hypothetical unethical scenarios are set. This study was conducted in Germany and the scenarios were all about hypothetical events that occurred in Germany. It’s not relevant that it’s Germany, but it is relevant that the unethical events are occurring in the same country as the people being asked to judge the unethical events. I think the results might have been different if the country in which the events occurred was different (geographically and/or culturally) from the country in which people were being asked to make the judgements. Limited familiarity with another country and its culture and standards of living make it more difficult to judge (or perhaps easier to dismiss, unfortunately). Consequently, maybe a brand could get away with unethical behaviour on the other side of the world, and the person making a judgement of the unethical behaviour won’t feel so personally impacted and therefore brand attachment might trump even highly unethical behaviour. (Hence, perhaps, the healthy profits for high street retailers despite those factory fires and inhumane working conditions that are frequently reported to be a part of their production line in countries such as Bangladesh, which is obviously the epitome of unethical behaviour. But of course there are myriad other factors at play in that issue as well.)

So maybe future research needs to investigate the other factors that influence the relationship between brand attachment and judgement of unethical behaviour. In the meantime, it’s interesting just to do a bit of good old meta-thinking, which I always find to be curiously enjoyable, even though I usually end up making an idiot out of myself in the process as I reveal the inconsistencies of my thinking (oh, being human). Nevertheless… what are the brands I feel attached to? Have there been reports of them behaving unethically, and if so, what did I think of it? Would I feel different if that particular unethical behaviour of a beloved brand was ascribed to a brand I didn’t care about? Because if I do feel different, then maybe I need to consider things a little more carefully…

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