Camellia Thea
Here's an interesting fact I uncovered recently. Until a certain point in history (say sometime during the 19th century) we Europeans had never seen tea in its natural state because we were not allowed to travel in interior China - which of course was where most of it came from in those days. Quite incorrectly several people tried to ascertain exactly what tea was - notably John Hill who declared in his Treatise on Tea (1753), quite without proof, that 'tea' comprised of several different varieties of plant.
Not for all the tea in China...
Apparently we became rather annoyed at China's monopoly so we obtained some seeds and headed off to the colonies namely India to try to grow tea there. We discovered that tea was already growing wild in Assam and we did some experiments to see whether the Chinese tea was better - which is wasn't by and large - so we settled on India as our main source. We also cleared up any misunderstanding about where tea comes from - it is native to the whole monsoon area of southeast Asia apparently taking in Thailand, Burma, southwest China and of course Assam.
So why the lecture? Well I came across an article recently that informed me that Unilever was getting two of its brands (Liptons Yellow Label and PG Tips) certified by the Rainforest Alliance - who examine a companies water conservation, soil management practices and labour conditions. They recently (well not that recently I admit) certified coffee sold by McD, Starbucks and Kraft. Essentially this is about Unilever using this as an added feel good factor for their products costing them somewhere in the region of £3.5m by 2015 - hardly a dent in the coffers really but an intervention that could make a significant difference.
So what?
Excellent - but in reality there is no discernable difference to the product in terms of making it significantly better - just a piece of visual communication to let people know the product was made ethically and ecologically correctly.
Interesting this as I asked a couple of mums about it and they all said they wouldn't change their current brand - but it would make them feel better about it if they did. So, there is no immmediate 'switching' potential - just a sort of retention based thing going on with the added benefit of a potent layer of emotionality.
Ethics in advertising?
So I thought about this some more as I had been talking to the wonderfully engaging Chris Arnold about his agency Feel whilst doing a little speaking thingy at the DMA (which was good fun - just wish I had seen Rory's presentation though) and I reckon he has got it absolutely spot on. The next level of branding (yeah I know John Grant has this covered) has to be the ethical piece. When I set up Holycow as a freelance company many years ago - its raison d'etre was to make the world a better place through ideas. Now it seems that this is entirely a good business model whereas before it was a hippy-esque pipe dream thing.
So it left me wondering at what point agencies will get that the real 'value' in the future will not be how memetically potent their ideas may be culturally based on a product difference, but how they can match the value set of existing and potential purchasers who wish to feel less guilty about consuming stuff they perhaps don't really need in an interesting way. This is a significant change and will require a different set of thought processes for planners I suspect - particularly as it means they will have to start being better at understanding human beings - not just communications. Cheers.