Business Ethics are principles that determine how a company behaves and how it influences its decision making process. A company should be morally responsible to the consumers, employees and the environment. This is especially essential in the modern context where the consumers are much more informed and knowledgeable. This paper shall undertake a study of the L’OREAL Company. It is the paper’s consideration that the company ranks as one of the best player in the market. It is imperative to appreciate that other than merely serving its customers with products, the company equally considers other issues that go a long way in ranking it as one of the best.
L’Oreal is the world’s largest beauty company. It is a multinational company with its headquarters in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France. It has offices worldwide, manufacturing a wide range of products focusing on makeup, perfumes, hair care, sun protection and skin care. It observes corporate social responsibility to its consumers, employees and the environment. In other words, it pursues what in modern context is referred to as the triple bottom line. This approach considers not only the profits, but also the people and the planet.
Consumers are the backbone of any business, they determine whether it succeeds or fails. Being a manufacturer of sensitive skin care products, L’Oreal has to ensure it is accountable to its consumers. It has to make sure its products are of the best quality. It is committed to market products that are safe and have undergone rigorous evaluation. It seeks to prevent consumers from experiencing any adverse effects from their product use. In 2013, L’Oreal announced a new sustainability plan, which will help it reach its goal of one billion consumers worldwide by producing quality products, which help customers make sustainable life choices. It also seeks to be morally responsible to consumers by producing not only quality products, but affordable ones too. In this way, L’Oreal exposes more consumers to its products and they are more than willing to buy them because of their affordability and quality. This shows the sensitivity towards the people with the emphasis being placed on the need to access commodities by all rather than targeting a given segment in the market.
L’Oreal value and respect its consumers. The employees make sure they are morally accountable to customers by encouraging feedback. The same is utilized to access the effectiveness of the company products in the market. This way they get to know what consumers really think about a product or a brand and they act on that feedback. Their customer care department is committed to the needs of the customers, they are responsive to the consumers’ inquiries, and they are patient, understanding and leave a customer very satisfied. L’Oreal also makes sure they are accountable to consumers by bridging the gap between the company and them. They make sure information about them and their products is readily available to the consumers. They do this in a variety of ways including their website, which is efficient and knowledgeable. A consumer logs out knowing much more about the company than they did before. It leaves a sense of belonging, making you feel like you really are part of the L’Oreal family. This approach is similarly seen as being one of the modern ways of marketing which blends well with the current generation.
Other than the consumers, L’Oreal has to be morally accountable to the environment. They have to make sure that their products have no negative impact on the community around them. Its goal is to produce products with less environmental impact and reduce their environmental footprint by around sixty percent by the year two thousand and twenty. In their sustainable development plan, L’Oreal declared that it would cut its greenhouse gas emission, water consumption and waste by fifty percent. By 2012, it was well on its way to achieving that goal. The company recorded a decrease in Carbon dioxide emissions by thirty-seven percent, a twenty-four percent reduction in water use and a reduction in waste by twenty two percent. For these achievements, Climate Counts named it a sector leader.
L’Oreal ensures moral accountability to the environment by caring for the animals. It effectively stopped all its animal testing for product safety. It no longer tests product or ingredients on animals anywhere in the world, and it does not delegate this task to anyone. This has, however, been challenging since in countries like China, it is mandatory to do animal testing. Cosmetics by their ‘Body Shop’ brand are, therefore, not available in China. Engineers at L’Oreal came up with ‘Episkin’, a reconstructed skin model that they use as an alternative to animal testing. It instead invests in researching alternatives to animal testing, investing nine hundred million Euros to this cause. In 2013, it was part of a team beseeching the EU to invest more on animal testing alternatives.
In addition, L’Oreal shows social responsibility to the environment by empowering women. Awards such as The L’Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science exist for this purpose. They seek to improve the position of women in science by giving recognition to outstanding women researchers. They also have The UNESCO-L’Oreal fellowship award that gives two year funding of forty thousand U.S. Dollars to promising young women engaged in scientific research projects. They are also part of “Look GoodFeel better” project that helps women with combating side effects of Cancer treatment. L’Oreal also organizes an annual business game for students called L’Oreal Brandstorm where they give prizes to the top three.
Another group of people L’Oreal has to be morally responsible to are their employees. It is very necessary to keep employees happy and motivated. This makes them fully committed to the organization and they work hard towards achieving the organization’s objectives. L’Oreal trains their employees as close as possible to the market, it ensures their well-being in the market and it advocates for diversity in the work place. In their sustainability commitment for the year 2020, L’Oreal plans to provide health care coverage for the employees in their respective countries. They also plan to provide financial security to them in the event that something unexpected like incapacity or permanent disability occurs. To improve the skills of their employees, they are also going to give them at least one training per year irrespective of where they are in the world. All these measures make the employees feel valued, safe and respected. They therefore become highly motivated and give back to the company a hundred percent.
The above-mentioned morally conscious decisions will have diverse effects on L’Oreal’s bottom line. The company’s bottom line is sustainability, which is their strongest legacy. They conduct business by balancing their success with the needs of the community. Other than sustainability, they also want to grow as a business. It is for this reason that they launched Sharing Beauty with all, a sustainability commitment plan for the year two thousand and twenty. Being morally accountable to consumers greatly contributes to L’Oreal’s growth. This is because consumers will be very satisfied; they will want to buy more of the company’s products. They will even help to market the products by telling their family and friends about L’Oreal’s amazing products. Helping consumers make sustainable consumption choices will strengthen their relationship with consumers and endear consumers to them.
In their ‘Sharing Beauty with All’ commitment program, L’Oreal is makes a moral decision to be accountable to the environment. They plan to improve the environmental profile of all their products by reducing the environmental footprint of their formulas. They also plan to improve their environmental profile by using raw materials derived from green chemistry. With all these measures in place, L’Oreal will gain even more favor with the community. Word about them and their environmental conservation efforts will spread, more people will want to associate themselves with L’Oreal and in so doing, and it achieves considerable growth. By deciding to value and care for their employees in all aspects of their life, L’Oreal is taking a huge gap towards achieving growth and sustainability. As earlier mentioned, when employees are motivated, they greatly contribute towards achieving the company’s ambitions. Because of this reason, the company records amazing growth. All these morally conscious decisions on how to deal with the consumers, employers and the environment have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line of growth and sustainability.
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