Burson-Marsteller

New tools to measure NGO risk

by Bill Royce on 23rd June 2010 • The Cast Blog

A Greenpeace activist once famously quipped that focusing on brands “was like discovering gunpowder for environmentalists”.   Campaigning NGOs have found that brands are vulnerable and sensitive to public attacks.

According to Michael E Conroy, author of ‘Branded’, the power of NGOs is increasingly defined by their ability to invent clever ways to “seriously embarrass a company, damage its brand and bring it to the table to change its practices”.

In a world that is ever-flatter, where networked NGOs use the internet and social media with devastating impact, any company with a brand to protect is potentially exposed.

Where is the next attack coming from, and who will be in the spotlight?  The Brand Vulnerability Index (BVI), which we developed with SIGWatch, is designed to help companies measure their NGO risk and manage down that risk strategically.

This is all the more important as NGOs will hold brands accountable for almost everything that happens in their full value chain – and go for the largest brands, not necessarily the worst performers.

When Greenpeace launched its gruelling palm oil campaign against Nestlé’s Kit-Kat brand on 17 March this year, it did so knowing that Nestlé was far from the worst offender.

Nestlé had already undertaken to source 100% of its palm oil sustainably by 2015, was currently  sourcing 18% sustainably, and hoping to lift that to 50% by the end of 2011. It has worked with other companies and key NGOs including WWF through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for several years.

So why would Greenpeace target Nestlé for this campaign?

To answer that question, we first need to remember that campaigning NGOs typically have three different core functions: advocacy, membership and fundraising.  Greenpeace needs regular high-impact campaigns both to recruit new supporters and to boost donations – and to demonstrate its “firepower” against corporate interests.

This was one of those moments, but Greenpeace’s interest in palm oil is not opportunistic. As with most Greenpeace activity, its mission is to “bear witness” to serious long-term issues that pose threats to human health, the environment or human rights.

Deforestation, together with land use changes, is responsible for around 20 to 25 percent of annual carbon emissions.  Palm oil expansion in South-East Asia for vegetable oil – as an ingredient in food and cosmetics and as a biofuel crop – is a major concern for many groups, including the UNEP, as plantations often replace rainforest (carbon sinks) and can heavily impact indigenous communities and biodiversity, particularly threatened species including orang-utans.

This is exactly why the RSPO was established in 2004 – to develop frameworks and certification procedures to promote sustainable sourcing for palm oil.  WWF brought considerable expertise, having developed with industry both the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) processes – both highly successful certification programmes.

The problem is: it takes time to agree these programmes, then to work with suppliers to improve their practices, and then to evaluate and verify compliance.  By mid-2009, only about 5% of global palm oil was certified sustainable. No major company can today claim 100% sustainable sourcing.

So for Greenpeace, attacking KitKat was irresistible:  a global consumer brand, with a warm public image;  a creative campaign based on destruction of orang-utan habitats;  a link to a presently unsolved challenge (protecting rainforest);  and opportunities for activists to have “fun” dressed as orang-utans invading Nestlé’s AGM, picketing Nestlé offices in Europe and Indonesia, defacing vending machines with campaign stickers, etc.

By the time that Nestlé announced on May 17 that it was joining with The Forest Trust to work with its supply chain to advance a ‘zero deforestation’ goal by 2015, Greenpeace claimed its campaign had achieved

• 1.5 million viewings on YouTube
• over 200,000 emails to Nestlé
• hundreds of phone calls
• thousands of Facebook comments

For Greenpeace, this campaign has been a moral victory even if the net effect has been to punish a company that was already determined to do the right thing – albeit that the RSPO could go further.  Greenpeace has admitted that its real targets were Indonesian palm oil supplier Sinar Mars and commodity supplier Cargill – both Nestlé suppliers, but neither a consumer brand.

Where will NGOs strike next, on what issue(s), and against which brand(s)? That’s what we try to answer with the BVI.   For more information, check out the BVI presentation and the media release.

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