DLB: We all know about your socially conscious design work: the war buttons, Light Up the Sky, We Are All African, and of course the Design of Dissent anthology. Aside from making work with explicitly ethical messaging, how do you express your values in your day-to-day design practice?

MG: I don't think my ethics in ordinary design practice are different than anybody else's. Fundamentally, I try to do no harm, not to lie, and to have the same sense of responsibility to the community that any good citizen would have. My idea is that if you have a definition of good citizenship, you behave within that definition. I don't think it's terribly complex.

DLB: Could you expand on what's involved in being a good citizen?

MG: Well, it's a long and moralistic definition, but I think everybody knows what it means. It means that you don't deliberately go out and attempt to move people to anything that will harm them; you don't misrepresent anything that you're responsible for transmitting. It’s not a very complicated idea. Telling the truth is simple. But the truth is also full of ambiguity. Sometimes you don't know the truth. Sometimes the truth can produce pain and difficulty.

But I think the fundamental thing in the design field is not to urge people to buy something or to move toward something that would harm them. Beyond that, it gets into a long and maybe overly complex series of issues.

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No Logo, 2001

The whole article is more than worth a read. Here, I've excerpted parts relevant to our interest (design ethics) below.

2000

No Logo, Naomi Klein’s treatise on anti-globalization, sets the tone for the decade's debates about consumerism and branding.

American Apparel moves into its current factory in downtown Los Angeles. Under the leadership of Dov Charney, it becomes an incongruous champion of locally-produced fair-labor clothing, racy quasi-pornographic advertising, and Helvetica.

After a tight presidential election introduces the world to the Floridian hanging chad, AIGA's Design for Democracy begins a massive effort to redesign and standardize voting across the nation.

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Nick recently wrote a post about the Civil Branding website and whitepaper. Here's his distillation of the whitepaper's argument:

Branding is a form of mass-communication. For better or worse, choosing brands is how we express which ideas we think are important. Therefore, marketers should encourage companies to adopt and promote progressive values in order to build a better society.

His argument against so-called civil branding is old hat for BlogLESS readers: Brands in fact shouldn't make vague, value-based promises in their advertising because in the best case they can't possibly keep them. He also noted that in many cases, these promises contradict a company's actions.

Putting a finer point on the latter case, Nick brought up a ludicrous set of recent advertisements for Citibank, who now promote their company using the notion "that there is more to life than the pursuit of money." Nick notes that Citibank hardly has the moral authority to make such claims: "That's a great sentiment, but it's hard to take seriously from a company that skims money from it’s customers’ accounts and takes unacceptable risks with their funds - all for the sake of making as much money as possible." I made a similar point in November to a PR person from oil multinational BP whose recent branding upgrade situates them "beyond petroleum."

The individual who wrote the Civil Branding whitepaper responded to Nick's concerns in the comments, suggesting that by merely putting forth "progressive messages," companies are taking on an ethically "constructive" role in society.

This idea is not only credulous, it's dangerous.

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We've been on a solid run of fairly substantive posts recently, breaking a little ground in a lot of directions. Today, I thought I'd take a moment to try and encapsulate the heart of our December work on the role of promises play in advertising and design.

Promise to Return by Edward Bielejec

This thread probably starts with our consequentialist account of design, which motivated our positions on telling the truth (and therefore being ethical -- an observation which we couldn't help but notice Seth Godin echoing recently). For those who may not recall our first slogan, it's very simple: Be good. Because if you're not, and you lie about it, people will find out.

From there, it was a matter of simply asking how we were on the hook for our choices. The answer to this question was easy: because our livelihood is based on securing the trust of the consumers and constituents to whom we tailor our clients' products and services.

Now, the real work was ready to begin. Let's review it:

1. We get consumer trust by making promises, which we call advertisements.
2. There's no other way to get this trust, and this fact leads to all manner of advertising tricks. We covered promising almost nothing, merely insinuating something -- however implausible, or promising something vague.
3. All these tricks make consumers jaded. This exhausts many of the standard model advertisement options, a fact which leads advertisers to adopt an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general.
4. This ironic stance, though, undermines trust in the brand, which was what advertising was supposed to secure in the first place.
5. This all leads us to believe that it's not enough to merely tell the truth, you have to make meaningful promises that you can keep.

In slogan form: Brands are built on trust, which is only sustainable when built on meaningful promises kept.

Combining our two slogans has interesting results, which we will continue to explore in February.

We've been slamming BlogLESS this month, trying to start stake out some positions on design ethics. About three weeks ago, though, Nick first asked a question that's crystallized the tone for our first investigation: Namely, "Why bother?" Why be ethical at all when we all know that greed is good?

Since then, our collective agenda has been to show that we don't know that at all. I think, inadvertently, we may have finished doing this last week. Here's what we've come up with, in all its syllogistic glory:

It's necessary for effective advertising to be coherent with reality. When it's not, people notice, and it's going to hurt you. Which leaves you with two options. First, you can act unethically and then lie about it or just omit it from your advertising, but there's reason to think that won't hold up. Otherwise, you can be good, and then put that right on the table. There are ways to do it, and it's probably less work.

If you are good, and you can coherently advertise the fact that you are good. If you're generous, conscientious, and civically minded, you won't have to resort to tricks or other ineffective strategies for profit maximizing. Your products and services will advertise themselves.

Therefore, be good. That's it. Simple as that.

Back in July of 2000, British Petroleum, the world's third largest global energy company, launched a massive $200 million public relations and advertising campaign, unveiling their current "green" brand image, in an attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers. The campaign was created by the British advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, who later the PRWeek 2001 "Campaign of the Year" award in the 'product brand development'. All told, BP spent around $200m on the rebrand.

The big ideal? What's that again?

The heart of the rebrand involved changing the company's name to BP (back from BP-Amoco, the result of a recent mega-merger), creating a wordmark in which small letters were used ("bp" was thought to have fewer imperialist associations than the erstwhile "BP"), and finally implementing a new corporate tagline, "beyond petroleum."

BP's then CEO John Browne said: "It's all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites." And it apparently did: During more than a decade with Browne as chief executive (ending last year), BP's market value rose fivefold and its share price rose 250 percent.

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I’m very late to the party with this one, but while shopping online recently, I noticed that Wal-Mart has updated its brand. The response so far seems cautious. Folks seem to like the new color scheme, the trendier font, and sentence case hyphen-less wordmark, but there is considerable confusion over the new glyph that replaced the five-pointed star in the logo.

What is that thing? Some people think it’s a sun, or maybe an asterisk. Others are quick to point out its resemblance to a sphincter. Quite a range of interpretation!

It’s an unfortunate bit of abstraction, to be sure, but I think all the consternation about what the logo looks like misses the bigger question of why?

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