Business as unusual

Anita Roddick visited the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo:

“Governments and businesses cannot change the world by themselves, but consumers can change it” says Anita Roddick founder of the successful store chain the Body Shop with strong visions for social responsibility in a CSR seminar at the Norwegian School of Management. According to Roddick, entering business was a bit embarrassing, but she has realised that she can help stimulating the grassroots movement through doing “business as unusual”. However, her own entry into business was a rather difficult one. She experienced prejudice from banks and investors alike who did not quite “get” what she was trying to do with the Body Shop.

The Body shop is one of the strongest brands in the world and a popular place to buy all sorts of beauty products. They are also well known for their sometimes quite radical and provoking campaigns on ban of animal testing, human rights and modern beauty ideals. For their strong stand against animal testing they are excluded as a retailer from one of the most promising markets in the world: China. But Roddick still does not want to conform to what she feels is immoral. And where does this strong morality come from? "My morality comes from literature”, Roddick says, and she often refers to poets and great thinkers like Marcel Proust.

“The Body shop is all about communication and we do not spend money on marketing at all, we use guerrilla marketing” says Roddick, and then you have to be able to shock people and do what your competition is either unwilling or unable to do. So, what has this to do with CSR?
“We try to challenge everything by doing the right thing to do” Roddick says with passion. “We for example use our trucks as moving billboards”. Indeed the billboards have been used for anything from missing children campaigns to support of Amnesty International. The body shop has also been more directly involved in helping change the world by building up child development centres and schools in third world countries. But it is not all about charity; it is also about changing the way we do business. For example, the Body shop founder tends to travel around in the world looking for knowledge and ingredients that she can use in the Body Shop products (“Travel for me as like a university without walls”). She then helps the locals building up production of this ingredient and thus improving the living standard by providing a product to export, establishing living wages and giving education to the women involved in production, and their children.

Anita Roddick also believes strongly in having employees as ambassadors for the values that the Body shop stands for, and all employees have to take part in community service. With more than 2000 franchise stores in 50 different countries, then perhaps the Body shop can change business?