Timberland’s Jeff Swartz explains why brands must start engaging consumers on social issues to rebuild trust lost during the financial crisis
Timberland’s Jeff Swartz explains why brands must start engaging consumers on social issues to rebuild trust lost during the financial crisis
Good leaders, as a general rule, don’t do fear. So it is refreshing to find business chiefs willing to admit that the financial crisis has them spooked. Rather than spreading panic, it shows they are in touch with the rest of us.
Jeff Swartz, president and chief executive of Timberland, is one leader who speaks openly about the harm the financial crisis could do to brands. Reflecting on the anti-capitalist G20 summit protests in London, in April, he says: “It scares the daylights out of people within Timberland.”
But although Swartz admits that he is worried by public anger at the financial crisis, he sees the global downturn as a huge opportunity for the company he has been at or near the top of for almost 20 years. He feels the crisis gives brands with a social message the chance to reconnect with disillusioned consumers.
To do so brands will have to overcome the massive social fallout caused by the economic crisis, Swartz says. “The social fabric is frayed at best and torn in many places.” He argues that the “vibrations in the system” run much deeper than consumers deciding to shop less. “It’s more profound than that. People are asking, ‘What’s safe? What’s the truth?’” The challenge for brands today is to find a message that is relevant for consumers who, as Swartz puts it, are “shaken and stirred and not like James Bond”.
Swartz is hoping Timberland can tap into the reserves of social capital it has amassed with consumers over many years to prosper in the current crisis. The company has a strong record of leadership in responsible business, from ethical sourcing to transparent reporting on its social and environmental performance. It now reports quarterly on non-financial matters, for example.
Timberland is reminding customers of this good reputation with a new advertising campaign, running in Europe, which Swartz describes as “edgy”. Featuring pictures of a Timberland boot, the ads are headlined: “We build things that last. Maybe we should go into the banking business.” Swartz says he “sweated overnight” deciding whether to approve the ads, which mock the finance sector. But he gave them the go-ahead because they speak to consumers’ demand for brands they can trust.
Campaign brand
But it will take more than clever advertising to win over disillusioned consumers. Swartz says he wants Timberland to become an institution people can identify with by campaigning on important social and environmental issues.
“We have just got involved,” he says. “For example we are for capping carbon emissions, but not for trading them. Timberland has never had a place in that conversation. We’ve sat on the side.”
Swartz says Timberland decided to get involved in advocacy because its own actions did not seem to make a big enough effort to address global challenges such as climate change.
Swartz believes governments have a key role to play in giving companies incentives to create a low-carbon economy. For example, Timberland’s major solar project at its Ontario distribution centre in California – one of the 50 largest solar projects in the world – could not have happened without state subsidies, he says.
But brands are understandably nervous about getting involved in public policy campaigns, Swartz says. “You get into this game and you get your head shot off,” he warns. He notes the example of Microsoft when it backed a gay rights bill in Seattle in 2005, only to withdraw its support for the measure after coming under pressure from local church leaders. The company ended up pleasing no one, achieving only a PR disaster for itself.
No wonder many brands prefer simply not to get involved. Swartz says brands in effect end up saying: “We are for profit. Leave us alone and don’t break our windows.” This is a reference to the way demonstrators attacked bank branches during the G20 protests. Consumers want more than this from brands, he believes.
Engaging customers
Swartz reckons brave brands that step up to engage customers on social and environmental issues will be rewarded. He says: “Consumers are starting to value brands as social institutions.” Swartz is seeing early indications of this, but he stresses that he is yet to see concrete proof of consumers wanting to regard brands in the same way they do NGOs, for example.
Swartz says he saw signs of a shift last year when Timberland experimented with Facebook, the social networking site. The company set up a Facebook group where users could pledge to plant a virtual tree; in return, Timberland pledged to plant a real one.
By the end of the year, Timberland had one million pledges for virtual trees – so many that the brand was struggling to plant real trees fast enough. So Timberland posted what it thought was a tactful message on Facebook explaining that it was falling behind on its side of the deal. The admission got a terrible response. Swartz explains: “We had people in Zimbabwe calling us corporate scumbags – and that was one of the nice ones.”
After a day of conference calls to work out how to appease its critics, Swartz did a live web chat to explain to Facebook users Timberland’s side of the story. He says the lesson of this episode was: “Brands must be transparent in a way that we have never been transparent before.”
Total transparency does not come easy to brands, Swartz believes. “We are learning how to get naked in front of customers in a socially acceptable fashion, which is not a first instinct for a brand like ours,” he says.
For example, Timberland has for three years carried “nutrition labels” on products that show in explicit detail the environmental impact of a product and the child-labour record of the factory that made it.
Swartz says customers want this information, but they also want to be able to compare Timberland with other brands on social and environmental measures. Timberland has offered its label as an example for other brands to use and is working with the Outdoor Industry Association to get such a label adopted. Progress has been slow to date, says Swartz.
As Swartz and Timberland take on their greatest challenge of talking to customers about sustainability, it is easy to forget one of the bread-and-butter issues for a responsible clothing business – managing ethical risks in its supply chain.
After 20 years of hard work, Swartz says Timberland is “almost at the point where we have achieved sustainability in human rights”. This does not mean abuses can be eradicated completely from Timberland supplier factories – “there are always problems” – but that its process for dealing with them is running itself and working well, he says.
An effective ethical supply chain programme involves a partnership between the brand, factory owners, factory workers and local NGOs, Swartz says. The goal is to ensure workers go from being “factors in production” to “partners in production”.
While sustainability is in sight on the human rights front, Swartz also has ambitious goals to cut the environmental impacts of Timberland shoes, which he notes “are toxic, by definition”. His ambition: “We need to make products that endure and last forever.” Swartz’s goal for Timberland is to “build something that is built so well and styled so powerfully that it will last”.
A second green goal is to create products that are completely recyclable and biodegradable. Timberland is not there yet, although Swartz hints that it is getting closer to making products designed so they can be easily taken apart and recycled.
Timberland is already using recycled materials to make its shoes and clothes. In March it announced a deal with Green Rubber, a company that can convert used car tyres back into useable rubber. Timberland is launching two new shoes with soles made from the recycled rubber.
Renewed vigour
Swartz says that in a recession brands will be more attuned to the opportunities of good environmental stewardship. He says that he is pressing design teams to focus on how to cut the amount of material and number of parts used to make a shoe without compromising its performance. This saves money and resources.
He explains: “At heart, responsible business does not mean being more expensive. You are not responsible in order to save cost, but saving cost is a consequence.”
The recession, Swartz says, will not compromise a brand’s sustainability efforts. He says the financial mess is a perfect opportunity for brands to make sure they are giving customers what they really want. That means focusing on good products that are built to last, and rebuilding consumer confidence in brands, he says.
Swartz is relishing the challenge. “The crisis is clarifying,” he says, comparing the process of re-evaluating Timberland’s products to going for a workout on a “crisp autumn morning”. He says: “I’m very confident that we are getting in shape like we haven’t been in shape for 10 years.”
About Jeff Swartz
Jeff Swartz is grandson of Timberland founder Nathan Swartz and son of current Timberland chairman, Sidney Swartz.
The youngest Swartz joined Timberland in 1986 as head of international sales, aged 26. He became chief operating officer in 1991. He moved into his current role of president and chief executive officer in 1998.