AT FIRST, the recent attack on the Body Shop in the United States was just another silly-season story. Then, as the rumour mill cranked into top gear and the share price began to tumble, the story was being taken more and more seriously on both sides of the Atlantic.
Immediately prior to publication of the article that caused all the fuss (in an American magazine called Business Ethics), the very edifice of ethical investment was said to be at risk because of the damage already done to Body Shop's reputation.
The article was duly published and instantly seen for what it was (a rather pathetic combination of bile, gossip with disenchanted ex-employees and a basic lack of fairness that invalidated even the strong points it had to make). Soon, the author of the article went into hiding, the share price started to recover, and the whole issue disappeared out of public view, leaving everybody more confused than they were at the start.
The whole idea of ethical investment (putting your money where you hope your principles are usually to be found) is still so new to so many people in this country that some of the basic ground rules have yet to be established. Ethics tends to be as much about relativities (company A is better than company B) as about absolute judgement (company A is wicked, company B a candidate for canonisation). It is just a lot harder working out where you stand relatively rather than absolutely.
On animal testing, for instance, the absolutes don't get you far at all. For most people, testing cosmetic products on animals is simply wrong, far too high a price to pay for so inessential a benefit. Easy. But that is where the debate starts!
What then is the best way of phasing out such tests? For a company such as Body Shop, does it mean avoiding the use of any ingredient which has been tested on animals after a certain cut-off date, as advocated by the RSPCA, or avoiding the use of such ingredients only if they have been tested on animals within the last five years, as advocated by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, or BUAV.
At first glance, the RSPCA's position sounds more "right on" than the BUAV's. But it is actually the five-year rolling rule which has been endorsed by the European Coalition to end Animal Testing as the most-effective campaigning device for persuading the whole cosmetics industry (not just the good guys) to abandon animal testing.
And that is why the Body Shop takes the BUAV line; because it is committed to the campaign as well as to getting its own policy right. To suggest that this position is somehow less ethical is therefore unwise and - as illustrated in the case of Fulcrum Productions - costly. After a six-week trial, damages of £274,000 were awarded against Fulcrum for claiming in a Channel 4 programme that Body Shop's position was no more than a cynical marketing device.
This can be very confusing. It is foolish to claim that the BUAV's position is more ethical than the RSPCA's, or vice versa. But the charge made against Body Shop is rather more subtle: that they are still being dishonest since Body Shop customers will automatically assume (precisely because of its high-profile campaigning role) that Body Shop would never use ingredients tested on animals, ie, the policy must be made to match the public perception - even if Body Shop tries to explain in good faith (which it does) why they don't think that's the best approach.
What emerges from all this is that it is the campaigning which gets Body Shop into such choppy waters. It isn't just trying, for instance, to improve the terms of trade for a small number of its suppliers in the developing world, it is out there campaigning vociferously for a general change in economic policy in favour of "Trade Not Aid".
And because Anita Roddick is such an effective campaigner (though even she must now be ruing the day when she was persuaded to do the American Express ad!), Body Shop generates a lot of copy about Trade Not Aid as well as about the firm's contribution to the cause.
And that is where the ethical-investment organisations in this country have become concerned. The actual number of fair-trade projects run by Body Shop is still small, and the contribution to total turnover probably less than one per cent. But the average punter might well assume it to be a great deal more than that.
As Gordon Roddick says: "Percentages do not speak for the time and effort that goes into our Trade Not Aid programme (the Body Shop will soon have nine people working on these issues), and they do not speak for the human relationships and trust which are built up over time."
Fair enough. But there has to be some way in which Body Shop can be encouraged to maintain its gloriously up-front campaigning stance without its customers being led to assume more than is warranted by the reality.
There is some pretty useful dialogue to be had here. Though Body Shop may well have seen off a very unethical attack in the so-called Business Ethics, it is a big enough company to acknowledge that it now needs to make better use of the expertise in the UK's burgeoning ethical-investment movement. It needs them as much as we need Body Shop.
