advertising expenditure as the cost of maintaining market share.
As it turned out, Lorna Young was not entirely alone in her quest for
shop distribution. In the early days of the Cafédirect launch, Oxfam and
Twin Trading activists called on supermarket managers to alert them to the
issues and opportunities of fair trade products. The Fair Trade Foundation
circulated hundreds of thousands of postcards to consumers so that they
too could give them to supermarket managers with the message to stock
fair trade products. After years of complaints about checkout queues filling
the supermarkets’ postbags, suddenly failure to support Cafédirect
became the top complaint.
Other retail marketers were all too aware of this shift in consumer values
and were working with their buyers to search out suitable products.
Cafédirect was considered to be in the vanguard of the fair-trade move-
ment, and ethically beyond reproach. Furthermore, it is no secret that
many supermarkets like working with small suppliers because the imbal-
ance of power means that they can get firms like Cafédirect to ‘do it their
way’. Publicly, supermarket buyers give three reasons for listing
Cafédirect. Firstly, if it is not on the shelves it may just reflect badly on the
store chain. Secondly, and more positively, it is seen to be the right thing to
do and they hope that it will help to build consumer loyalty. Thirdly, with
supermarket listings now multiplying, the brand is selling well. The latter
is, of course, the real acid test.
Launch postscript
British supermarkets are giving the product a fair chance; the rest is really
up to consumers and their willingness to repeat purchase the brand on a
regular basis. Perhaps they will be prepared to do this. Research commis-
sioned by the Co-operative movement indicates that, ‘Consumers are
willing to penalise retailers and brands which fail to meet their ethical stan-
dards and to reward those that do ... one in three consumers reported that
they had boycotted a shop or brand in the past. Six out of ten are ready to
do so now.’
However, now that Cafédirect is supplying most of the supermarkets,
the buyer–seller relationship has changed and the call of the more strident
activists to ‘protest march down to your supermarket’ has become coun-
terproductive.
It is time for the Cafédirect team to reassess their marketing strategy and
to build closer relationships across their entire network.
206 Relationship Marketing