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Question: Origin Green: When Your Brand is Your Supply Chain

Answer: Customers tend to take note of the supply chain when something goes wrong. In a sustainability context, this means that a firm’s stakeholders may react negatively to suppliers violating environmental laws or using child labor. Therefore, it is no surprise that supply chain managers focusing on making the chain more sustainable often look to mitigate such risks through means such as certifications, audits, and tighter coordination (Hajmohammad & Vachon, 2016). These processes are familiar, in that they have long been used to mitigate risks of poor quality or late delivery and they can be helpful in meeting stakeholders’ sustainability expectations (Hajmohammad & Vachon, 2016).
Meeting stakeholder expectations in terms of the supply chain’s social and environmental performance may confer legitimacy on the chain (Bebbington, Larrinaga, & Moneva, 2008), but these actions alone will not differentiate the supply chain or its goods and services from its competitors’ goods and services. Approaching sustainability from a risk perspective implies that the job of supply chain managers, when it comes to sustainability, is to protect the chain’s reputation from harm. Differentiation is a task typically left to marketing, whose job is to build the brand or reputation.
In practice, this divide where supply chain mangers worry about risks and marketing focuses on differentiation has always been rather tenuous; a firm cannot build a brand on low prices if the supply chain is not efficient (Fisher, 1997). Similarly, choices made in the supply chain, such as selecting (or not) fair-trade suppliers, will influence efforts to improve a firm’s reputation for being responsible or having sustainable brands (Castaldo, Perrini, Misani, & Tencati, 2009). Risk mitigation and efforts to enhance a reputation or brand may often be researched separately, but one of the chief contentions of this chapter is that they are part of the same continuum where a supply chain manages sustainability by engaging in a collection of risk mitigation and brand-building actions simultaneously.
The case of Origin Green provides an insight into the link between managing a chain to be sustainable by controlling supply chain risks and creating a brand based on having more sustainable goods and services. Origin Green is a brand for all Irish farm and food products, and the essence of the brand’s message to customers is that the Irish food supply chain operates in a more sustainable manner. Keller (1993) notes that brand equity is a result of being highly recognized (strong) for being unique in a favorable way. The unique and favorable aspects of Origin Green rest on the supply chain. Hence, the chain could not be designed or managed from a pure risk reduction strategy and the brand cannot be built or maintained without considering supply chain management. The case then provides an insight into the process of building a brand and a supply chain simultaneously.

(Source: , 06 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/S2045-060520160000005017