In this collaborative world, if we own the royal mile, then we have to accept that our suppliers are our responsibility!!!

This is a continuation of my most recent blog ‘A bad piece of meat will always be a bad piece of meat!’ where I discussed how choosing suppliers based on image, price, or size can often lead to less than satisfactory results… In my case a very bad piece of meat from Tesco’s.

You could argue that if I could not see how bad the meat was through the packaging, then how could Tesco’s have seen it? You could then also argue that it’s therefore not their fault!

Wrong! Why? Because I don’t care who actually packaged the meet, I don’t care if Tesco’s was conned by their supplier, I just care about who sold me the product, because it’s with that organisation I have a relationship, and it’s that organisation I’m looking to trust!

Whoever is responsible for ‘the last mile’ – lets call it the royal mile (the bit just before the product or service touches me), whoever’s brand is on the packaging is the ONLY company I will blame when something goes wrong!

So when I buy a pair of Nike shoes I expect them to have been manufactured somewhere where working conditions are good, and wages are descent. I don’t care that Nike sells millions of shoes and pieces of clothing each year, I don’t care that Nike does not produce any of these products themselves, I don’t care that they have contracts with manufacturing facilities located throughout the world, and I don’t care that these contractors subcontract to companies hiring nearly 800,000 people working in factories throughout Asia.

When Unilever buys palm-oil from the Indonesian company Duta Palma who has a practice of clearing protected rainforest to make way for plantations – I don’t care who ultimately did what, and I therefore end up blaming Unilever, not Duta Palma.

All I care about is that I get the quality I pay for. All I care about is that my shoe supplier, and the company responsible for my beauty care, in their quest to get me the quality I pay for behave in the right way! All I care about is that the brands I have a relationship with, and I trust, do the right thing – because when they act, they also act on my behalf, they act on the behalf of all their customers – so what they do is not just their decision, what they do does not just affect their brand, it affects all our personal brands!

In this collaborative world we have to accept that our suppliers are our responsibility. In this collaborative world we have to make sure the right systems are in place to ensure customers buy what they believe they buy. In this collaborative world we have to make sure that not only we, but our suppliers do the right thing!

Hard? I’m sure it is, but think of all the times you have bought products without any quality problems. Think of all the multinationals that have never been caught out like Unilever and Nike – we can reasonable assume that many of them have not been caught because they have done nothing wrong.

So although it’s hard to control your entire value chain – it’s clearly not impossible!

Oh yeah, and doing the less of two evils is just well, not good enough!

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