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Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................................................4
Background....................................................................................................................................................4
Formatting and Referencing Rules................................................................................................................4
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................................4
Reference List................................................................................................................................................5
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Evaluation and Analysis of the Secondary Data
The case of H&M presents critical and important details, beginning with the fact that it
has become one of the most well-known fashion brands, as well as achieving reputational capital
over the course of time. It has all contributed greatly in making the critical assertion about the
impact that H&M has upon the world, and all the different ways that they impact on a global
basis across different major contexts (Arrigo, 2018). Arrigo (2018) highlights how the fast-
fashion model of this brand is directly associated with its entire structure across retail stores. For
H&M, the key to achieving maximum customer satisfaction could be formulated with profound
market knowledge and information. This particular detail has been characterized in terms of
applying advanced technologies like big data analytics and numerous customer personae that
would allow for production details to become more exact and specific product offerings,
according to a vast range of trends, designs, preferences, choices, etc. (Arrigo, 2018) H&M’s
profound market knowledge directly translates to advantageous launching, as well as
distinguishing the continuous and successful ranges in the apparel.
However, Javed et al. (2020) argue that the consumers’ sustainability perception of H&M
that could be distinguished in terms of crucial aspects are related to its own claims, which
formulate the broader part of their key concerns across the board. These have most prominently
featured is ‘used garment voucher’ that consumers receive after donating their purchased H&M
apparel back to the company, which is then to the partner I:CO that repurposes and recycles to
retail them on their own (Javed et al., 2020). This point directly associates with the critical
perceptions commonly related to industry agreement with other fashion companies like Zara to
collectively engage in avoiding endangered forests across the world, which would extend to
sourcing various materials across their supply chain. López et al. (2022) identifies this as the
crucial distinction in which sustainability concerns would be addressed not just with
sustainability partners but also taking widespread labor concerns into consideration. This kind of
industry-wide collective agreement extended to halting leather sourcing from Brazil because of
the wildfires in the Amazon Rainforest in 2019.
The H&M Foundation (n.d.) is crucial in this case from the perspective of actual
sustainability with an in-company non-profit affair, which has been privately funded by the
Persson family, the founders of the company. However, as noted by Javed et al. (2020), these are
apparently critical for the consideration of affairs directly affecting the company in terms of
distinguishing the factors relevant directly in this case. Still, in order to fully understand these
perspectives, it is possible to establish critical viewpoints that could be established through
analyzing the industry context with respect to greenwashing.
Greenwashing in Fast-Fashion Industry Context
For this case, it is crucial to present and distinguish important perspectives that could be
brought together in direct reference to applying the PESTLE for macro environment context and
Porter’s Five Forces for the micro environment context as frameworks respectively.
PESTLE
The important considerations about greenwashing could be distinguished by Kaner
(2021) who distinguished important grounds in which political matters become a composite of
distinct issues. By taking the issue of H&M, it explores the critical grounds that could be detailed
are related to the economic significance and how legal factors may affect them. As already
noted, H&M’s global impact on fashion and apparel is significant, and there are vested interests
in seeing them grow and achieve critical outcomes across the board (Kaner, 2021). This results
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in the level of political interventions to increase and become interventionary amongst the
developed world by all considerations.
Kaner (2021) underscores the economic impact of the fast-fashion to be a critical source
of greenwashing because the priority of stakeholder demands are prioritized with respect to the
total financial performance to its major shareholders. In those terms, it is highly crucial to ensure
that whatever grounds that might be competing against financial performance to be inflated and
presented to the public with misdirections and/or inaccurate claims about sustainability
performance. However, according to Adamkiewicz et al. (2022), this point is very directly
affected by the growing and increasing demands from the fashion industry to become sustainable
in the near future. It leads to greenwashing as an alternative to major concerns in which a variety
of creative methods are showcased to signify both economic sustainability and growth alongside
those of environmental concerns. However, as noted by Javed et al. (2020), it could be assessed
how significant and extreme demands of financial growth normatively runs counter against the
total business concepts and models of the entire fast-fashion industry.
Socio-culturally, there are a lot of convergences across a range of factors that associate
with consumers’ perceptions about fast-fashion and the ethics of their consumption. According
to Lu et al. (2022), it most crucially underscores the younger demographics of consumers who
engage with fast-fashion, and the ethical and related socio-cultural factors coming into play
describes the important assertions across the board. This arguably creates the greatest extent of
dissent and differences related to the perceptions and behaviors of different consumer groups
affecting the state of the fast-fashion industry.
According to Alexa et al. (2021), it is highly crucial to assert technological innovation as
the greatest source of change. It was technology innovation in a variety of different ways that
initially asserted the achievements made possible in terms of all major aspects of the broader
fast-fashion model. It is with this perception all aspects that are not environmentally sustainable
would present alternatives for doing the same.
The environment is at the core of concerns that are directly related to important outcomes
presented collectively. Bick et al. (2018) arguably present the most crucial distinctions that could
be formulated directly in terms of referring to the ‘global injustice’ occurring with respect to
fast-fashion industry’s environmental impact taken in totality.
Meanwhile, Binet et al. (2019) formulates the crucial and critical perspectives that could
be brought forth in terms of the ‘great debate’ about legal imposition on companies to adopt
sustainability all across themselves. For fast-fashion, it is a crisis that must be addressed
specifically in order to achieve sustainability in contrast to given considerations, against possible
alternatives and possibilities.
Porter’s Five Forces
The implications that could be supported with respect to the micro-environment
associates very directly with H&M’s own state of affairs with strategies in the circumstances and
context of the total industry environment. Therefore, industry rivalry becomes a very crucial
point to be considered, according to Kaner (2021), who stresses the fact about competitive
advantage in fast-fashion to take up almost the majority of priorities in order to ensure that many
market implications for the H&M brand are satisfied. Seo and Suh (2019) stress that while
sustainability would be high up in terms of priorities for market performance against industry
rivals, there is arguable competition with financial performance being the critical focus of
rivalries and regularly overshadow all other concerns for this company.
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The supplier power is another aspect of H&M and the fast-fashion in which there are no
easy answers in a global context. According to Sandberg and Abrahamsson (2022), while this
company has the necessary power tipped on its side to have relatively low shifts of costs, its
closest competitors affect them with respect to size and scale of affairs. As a result, supplier
power is only moderately low in this case.
The buyer power, however, offers a rather distinguishing viewpoint about possessing
even lower switching costs because of the abundance of alternatives in the market. It actually
drives the entire degree of sustainability that H&M and the rest of the fast-fashion industry have
sought to establish in this context (Kim and Oh, 2020). The abundance of buying power is
conveyed and highlighted as critical in the totality of these affairs.
Threat of new entrants is usually not a concern for a company the size of H&M as well as
market share across the global fast-fashion industry. However, Sagapova et al. (2022) the distinct
considerations of sustainability innovation arguably underscores the increase of threats by the
way of disrupting the industry. It shall result in very quick and sudden reduction in the
company’s market share as well as overall competitive advantage.
Threat of substitution could be understood with respect to the same grounds of
sustainable innovation, as they have been described by Sagapova et al. (2022). In this context,
the entirety of details would be conveyed through a number of perspectives with incumbent fast-
fashion and other fashion competitors of H&M.
Greenwashing done by H&M and its Implications
The major case of greenwashing was revealed by Stern and Retailwire (2022) that
constituted total and extreme misreporting in product scorecards about reaching sustainability
points. This constituted not only misleading customers through legal repercussions that would be
faced by H&M, but also exposed the lack of efficacy that was imaginable with existing
indicators and measurement tools that have emerged across the world and in the fashion industry.
Stern and Retailwire (2022) also distinguish important concerns that could be understood as the
possibility that H&M and its competitive rivals in the fashion industry engage with many other
practices, which would be distinguished in terms of other reporting and watchdog by external
parties and forces. As noted by Javed et al. (2020), this entire state of affairs convey important
implications in which fast-fashion and these companies will never achieve sustainability, and
would instead mislead and harm the environment more in the future.
Majláth (2017) focuses distinctly on the relevant outlooks that are associated with
sustainability messages in their advertisements. This not only highlights misleading outlooks as
well as extralegal outlooks through which the entire notion of sustainability is affected, which
would affect the core consumers’ perceptions. These perspectives have been addressed by Kaner
(2021) in terms of incomplete or insufficient efforts by companies like H&M in order to present
illusions of green practices and processes respectively. The arguments along those lines shall
present the core issues associated with a number of distinctions and outlooks across the board.
These must change in order to fully address the case of business innovation in H&M that would
completely transform the fast-fashion model adopted by the company and its closest competitors
to something entirely new.
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Reference List
Arrigo, E., 2018. The key role of retail stores in fast fashion companies: the H&M case
study. Contemporary case studies on fashion production, marketing and operations, pp.121-137.
Javed, T., Yang, J., Gilal, W.G. and Gilal, N.G., 2020. The sustainability claims' impact on the
consumer's green perception and behavioral intention: A case study of H&M. Advances in
Management and Applied Economics, 10(2), pp.1-22.
López, T., Riedler, T., Köhnen, H. and Fütterer, M., 2022. Digital value chain restructuring and
labour process transformations in the fast‐fashion sector: Evidence from the value chains of Zara
& H&M. Global Networks, 22(4), pp.684-700.