Kitty TBS after L'oreal

The Body Shop and L'Oreal: Why can’t big be beautiful?

The backlash against Body Shop over its sale to L’Oreal is misguided

So L’Oreal is the new owner of Body Shop.

This has to be good news. Two entrepreneurs built a durable brand through, not in spite of, championing their values. They could have closed the business down, broken it up, sold it to venture capitalists, or floated it on the stock exchange.

Instead they have sold the company as a going concern, safeguarding the livelihoods of staff and the employees of suppliers from some of the poorest parts of the world.

And yet the corporate social responsibility community is not amused. Anita and Gordon Roddick are accused of abandoning their principles.

In the weeks since the announcement of the deal we have been told by BrandIndex that Body Shop’s “satisfaction” rating has dropped by 11 points to 14, and its “buzz” rating, a measurement of a brand’s trendiness, has fallen by 10 points to -4.


The fact that Nestlé owns 26% of L’Oreal will not have done anything to help improve this.
Mike Brady, co-ordinator of Baby Milk Action, which campaigns against Nestlé, said: “[Body Shop] has been damaged, perhaps terminally, by linking itself to the world’s ‘least responsible company’.”

The inverted commas save Brady from the charge of overt intellectual dishonesty. He is quoting an internet poll conducted last year in which Nestlé was proclaimed the world’s least responsible company.

He knows that all over the world there are far less responsible employers – employers that exploit young girls for the sex trade; employers that bully and threaten and deny people access to their basic human rights.

The only reason Nestlé comes top in such consumer polls is that Nestlé is big and therefore an obvious target.

Big by popular demand

But big is not necessarily bad. Nestlé would never have become big without millions of consumers wanting its products and coming back time after time.

Multinationals like Nestlé, and L’Oreal do not sit outside society. They have succeeded in the long term through engaging the public in highly competitive markets. If these companies were national governments, this would equate to landslide victories in a series of ruthlessly fought elections.

At every stage this has meant anticipating how social trends would impact upon consumer needs.

Now that the values of organisations have gained marketing importance alongside the quality of their products, it is natural for multinationals to turn to companies that have learned from experience how to avoid undue exploitation of people or the environment.

It would make little sense for them to spend money and not to extract the expertise they paid for. As Anita Roddick says: “I do not believe that L’Oreal will compromise the ethics of the Body Shop. That is after all what they are paying for and they are too intelligent to mess with our DNA.

“I want to make things happen, to spread human values wider in business if I possibly can. And this sale gives us the chance to do so.”

In creating Bodyshop, the Roddicks created something of value, and in selling it they have found a potential amplifier for disseminating their values.

Local action on ethical products hits the buffers where people have been reluctant to let go of their favourite products in favour of more ethically sourced alternatives.

The fact that multinationals are buying into the ethical concept means that there is an opportunity for the first time for this to permeate the mainstream. Tesco can claim to have done more for the organic movement – eventually – than any number of farmers’ markets.

To use a political analogy, if you wanted to effect global change on an issue, you couldn’t do it on the back of passionate support of Luxembourg, Cyprus and Vietnam. You’d need the US and China on side.

The large multinationals have the power and influence to make real change happen. Many people express negative emotions towards them that range from distrust to outright hatred, but ultimately their success is the true barometer of people’s feelings towards them.

Business is an agent of change. Big business is the biggest agent. Detachment and contempt are easy; engagement and compromise are courageous. To tackle major problems, we need to think big.



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