Many voluntary business initiatives have been taken in Western Europe since 1997 to persuade consumers to reduce their carbon emissions, as well as saving money for consumers, but these initiatives have had limited success.

This is even more important in order to meet EU policy targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020 from a 1990 base. Given that future emission reduction targets are likely to be even stronger, following the 2015 international Paris Agreement on mitigating climate change, it is important for businesses to better understand what has worked and what might work better to influence their customers’ actions in more environmentally friendly directions.

Recent research in one area of consumption has given some pointers for how businesses might learn from others' experiences so far. We're now working on the publication strategy!

Pleased to have had a paper published about UK's large retailers and their initiatives since 2007 to reduce carbon emissions in use, see here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615011609

From the abstract:
We analysed 18 initiatives analysed and show that the vast majority were not well planned nor were they strategically coherent. Secondly, most of these specific initiatives relied solely on providing information to consumers and thus deployed a rather narrow range of consumer behaviour change mechanisms. The research concludes that leaders of retail businesses and policy makers could improve their approach by ensuring processes, actions and measurements are comprehensive and integrated, in order to increase the materiality and impact in reducing consumer emissions in use. Furthermore, retailers could benefit from exploring different models of behaviour change in order to access a wider set of tools for change.

Great to meet so many people with interesting research at this event. 
To see all the details, go to the conference page.
Particularly looking forward to hearing Georgos Kallis about 'sustainable degrowth' and how it fits with coevolutionary approaches to thinking about how solutions might happen.

It was great to be part of this event. If you missed it, here is a video of what went on and here's the website that tells you more about this series of events.

A recently published paper I wrote is featured by the University on its news site here. In this paper, I argue that, while the UK’s leading clothing retailer has encouraged more sustainable consumption of clothes, such successes are unlikely to be replicated on a larger scale without more government stimulation for innovation in the way we make, buy, use and dispose of our clothes.

It was a real pleasure to get together with industry experts across Europe last week in Amsterdam to take part in judging the annual PLMA Salute to Excellence Awards. The results will be announced here.

We saw some really top quality products, together with innovative packaging and presentation. But it was all conducted with secrecy even amongst the judging panels, so I’m looking forward to seeing who the winners are!

Pleased to say that I've just had a paper published in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, about Marks & Spencer's Plan A initiatives to promote more sustainability in clothing consumption.
Apart from the academic conclusions, I found it quite amazing that, doing the research based only on the reports available in public, how much you can work out about how the initiatives developed over 7 years; thanks especially to M&S's fully transparent approach and easy to follow format for the initiatives over those years. 

One aspect that has emerged in the past days is that Tesco now thinks it has far too many SKUs. The range has apparently growth by 31% in the past 18 months, if Dave Lewis is quoted correctly here (£)
A common problem for both retailers and brand owners. SKU numbers rise and just have to be culled from time to time, in a clearly targeted exercise. 
It's all very well talking about the 80:20 rule, but, under pressure, no business wants to lose customers because they haven't got the particular item being sought.
Some thoughts:
1. maintain a 'one in, one out' policy with npd
2. have a cull of SKUs every 12 months
3. maintain a clear quantified focus on low selling SKUs and demonstrate how little business they account for, as part of regular internal reporting

When is an own label really a brand?

Tesco, in the news today for their profit warning, set out to build brands of their own a couple of years ago. Whilst some commentators were dismissive, others said 'why shouldn’t they?' With PR and celebrity and ‘expert’ culture so much more important than it used to be, together with the immediacy of the activities of the twittering classes, old-fashioned brand building through national, broad scale, TV campaigns may not be necessary anymore to build great brands when retailers have the distribution muscle and shelf space. Other retailers may have equally good opportunities; Boots have shown the way over tens of years, so much so that consumers don’t think of No 7 and Soltan as own label brands, just good trusted brands in their own right.

However those brands, and their plans to do more, have disappeared pretty quickly, or are now on sale at half price. Tesco have discovered that it’s not so easy to build the capability and expertise for successful consumer brand innovation, and it needs consistency and a long term approach: Boots No 7 was launched in the 1930’s. Another example of what seems to be easy when you are a leader in one market, but another sector is not really one of retailer’s area of expertise, it’s not as simple as it appears. 

What did I learn talking with Russian retailers?
Dramatic change in the last 20 years, in terms of the customer offer, but a real opportunity to go further and add value through differentiated products. 

Not at all easy, because few retailers have the critical mass that gives the scale for product development that we are used to in Western Europe, but I think the prizes will be there for the bold who make a start to experiment with innovation, provided they plan systematically, base those plans on customer insights and learn fast. 

Many thanks to BBCG for great organisation and for arranging for me to see my name in Russian script, for the first time.