Anita Roddick

Anita Roddick

Anita Roddick, born in 1942, was the founder of the Body Shop International. She was an inspiring and influential business executive that shaped ethical consumerism. Her company was one of the first to prohibit the use of ingredients tested on animals and promoted fair trade. She was a controversial woman in the world of business and her new and radical ideas sparked controversy not only within the cosmetics industry that she was operating in, but also within the entire world of business economics. Instead of following the norm of focusing on the business, profits, and costs, Roddick made corporate social responsibility the center of her business model; she believed that its possible to turn a profit while practicing ethical conducts.

Anita Roddick built her success off her franchise The Body Shop in 1976 as a way to earn a living while her husband was away on a two-year horseback journey across America. She started small and showed the importance that creativity held for her when she began packaging her all-natural products in urine sample bottles. Her creativity and the company's strong environmental flare led to its quick success. Roddick had already opened a second shop before her husband's return of being gone 10 months. When Anita Roddick opened her first Body Shop, she did not expect to get rich. She just hoped to survive. Her plan was disarmingly simple--she would create a line of cosmetics from natural ingredients and rather than rely on vanity to sell her products, she would appeal to her customers' concern for the environment. Through a combination of low-key marketing, consumer education and social activism, The Body Shop rewrote the rulebook for the $16 billion global cosmetics business and made Roddick one of the richest women in England. Customers wanted to sell the products, and in 1984 the company went public and spread franchises all over England. Her company soon grew into an international business with more than 200 stores in 50 countries and worldwide sales of 700 million pounds (1).

The Body Shop also began at a time when women were beginning to enter the workforce on a larger scale, and many women were trying to break into management by adopting masculine characteristics; they believed in order to gain success they must embrace patriarchal values of men. Unlike these women, Anita Roddick, who had never attended a business school, decided to pursue a different route, and she purposefully moved into the world of management as a woman instead of a woman who had changed herself to have male characteristics. She explains "Women's management style is vastly different [to men's] ...Women are networkers, they hate hierarchy, they constantly ask questions and they like working in cells (2)." Anita's business approach was doing the research to see what the competition is doing and then see what can be done to be different. The Body Shop became a different kind of business: a business drawn to innovation and creativity, instead of the commonly used principles of marketing and organization.

The Body Shop was was an innovative, unconventional, and challenging to cosmetic business. Roddick agitated those who were already in the cosmetic industry by advocating natural creams, lotions, and scents, some of which were exotic, eccentric, oils and extracts of uncertain effectiveness and mildness at the expense of more conventional ingredients In addition, Roddick's guerilla warfare against animal testing caused major strife and conflict within the cosmetic industry. While others were focusing on increasing profits by becoming more cost efficient, Roddick was focusing on retailing and producing products that shaped consumerism.

Anita Roddick was a social activist, she was known for her campaigning work on environmental and humanitarian issues. She was involved with Green Peace, The Big Issue, and founded children on the Edge. The Big Issue was a street newspaper founded by her husband, Gordon Roddick and John Bird. It is one of the most widely circulated street newspapers in the world today. The Big Issue was one of UK's leading social businesses that offered help to homeless people by providing opportunities of earning an income and integrating them back into mainstream society. In 1990, she found Children on Edge, a charitable organization that helped underprivileged children in Eastern Europe and Asia after witnessing the conditions of orphans in Romania. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth appointed Anita Roddick Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire for all of her accomplishments and contributions to society (3).

Anita was a woman that was driven not by money but by social responsibility. In November 27, 1999; she addresses the International Forum on Globalization in Seattle Washington with her speech "Trading with Principles." In Anita Roddick's "Trading with Principles" she expresses her desire to see international and domestic trade/economical practices become more ethically viable, opposed to the corrupt and selfish fiscal systems currently controlling market free enterprise. The speech was formatted comprising of three rhetorical devices: epideictic, forensic, and deliberative connotations. Each of these rhetorical frames of references has a specific audience and relationship to past present and future events. The epideictic use of language addresses the audience about who is to be praised or blamed at present events. The forensic audience takes into account the causes of the past for the current condition of things; while conversely the deliberative rhetoric focuses on the negative propositions for the future. Since Anita's speech includes all three of these devices, it could be categorized as a "rhetorical hybrid".

Examining this speech in chronological order with respects to the rhetoric, we first dissect the forensic characteristics Anita uses to make her case. Her claim is that it is the unethical and inhumane barbarians of globalization that are the proprietors of increasing financial oppression. "Half a century ago there were a million black farmers in the US; now there are 1800; globalization means the subsidies go