Ikea, the giant international home products company, recently found itself in a very awkward situation. It appears that the company’s suppliers used political and criminal prisoners. This directly contradicts Jeanette Skjelmose statement, Ikea’s sustainability manager, who said: “We deeply regret that this could happen. Using political prisoners in production has never been accepted within the Ikea Group.”

Ikea acquired the services of Ernst & Young, an accounting firm, to look into the matter, dating back 25-30 years. This digging into the past may prove more irksome and defaming  than Ikea may anticipate considering how, ‘The group is campaigning for compensation for many former prisoners, whom they say carry psychological and physical scars from the labour they were forced to do.’ Such unveilings of the past can destroy a company’s reputation singlehandedly but it seems Ikea is determined to rise above this as it has asked Ernst and Young to look deeply into this matter and come up with a report.

Ms Skjelmose went on to say that Ikea follows a strict procedure and codes of conduct for its suppliers now but also accepted that the measures used earlier were not effective enough.

This coming out clean by Ikea is a component of Corporate Social Responsibility which they aim to enforce through their image as socially responsible company. ‘Ernst & Young looked at 20,000 pages of documents from Ikea’s internal records and 80,000 archived items from German federal and state archives and interview more than 90 people.’ The level of extensive research and probing depicted above proves that Ikea wants a clean and fair representation of the past and  a ‘clean’ image, accepting of its own mistakes and rectifying them.

Ikea is not alone in this in today’s day and age where reputation of companies is vitally important and they strive to maintain those images to be seen as a socially responsible company. In one of my previous posts, I wrote about Olympus digging up records of the past few decades to rectify some grave mistakes.

Therefore, it is evident that being a ‘clean’, ‘uncorrupted and ‘honest’ company is what everyone is aspiring to be these days. The question however is, is all this part of a marketing strategy to attract more customers or a genuine effort to uphold standards of social responsibility?

You decide!