Blogless

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.

Via.

I love this logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America. Playing on the well known hospital cross symbol, designer John Langdon created a witty and austere rendering of the company’s tagline: “We rebuild lives, step by step by step.”

Logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America by John Langdon (Via)

Another clever logo that deploys a positive/negative space ambiguity to good effect is this one, for the Food Writers, by 300million.

Logo for Food Writers by 300million (Via)

What do you do when you receive poor service or shoddy products? Write a letter or perhaps call the company? Leave feedback on a website? To escalate things further, you might tweet, post on Facebook, or even write a blog post about the experience. But if you really want action on your complaint, I suggest taking a picture.

We’ve written several times about the power of technology to create transparency and expose poor business practices. I can’t believe that up to this point we haven’t mentioned one of the oldest forms of this practice: photography.

Now that nearly everyone has a digital camera on them at all times (thanks to cell phones), publishing a picture in the moment is as trivial as sending an email. Citizens are wielding this power to hold governments and police accountable for their actions. We should expect them to do the same for companies.

Most people prefer their food without a layer of oil on top.

The UK was abuzz yesterday over “the world’s best passenger complaint letter”. In this letter, a former Virgin passenger writes at length about the horrible food and entertainment he experienced on a recent flight. While I found the prose entertaining, I was more swayed by the pictures he took with his cell phone.

Apparently, the one one the left (with the tomato) is the dessert.

From the letter alone, one might come to the conclusion that the author was merely exaggerating for effect. But to actually see the food in question is another matter. Pictures provide evidence to one’s claims. Moreover, pictures require minimal investment. Reading takes time and attention. It takes a person practically no time to scan a picture and form an opinion.

Look at that picture and come to your own conclusion. Would you want to eat that stuff? How can an airline (especially Virgin) possibly find that acceptable?

If you run or work at a company, the next time you see something that looks wrong or is of substandard quality, ask yourself: “What would somebody think about my business if they saw a picture of that?”

Because, these days, they just might.

This is a kind of half of a post. It’s really an invitation to read This is what I have learned (PDF) by Milton Glaser for the AIGA National Design Conference, "Voice" in 2002. Here, he condenses 50 years of practical design wisdom into ten succinct, often counter-intuitive points. I will merely list the points, but I promise, each one is worth a read.

1. You can only work for people that you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more.
6. Style is not to be trusted.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right.
10. Tell the truth.

Milton Glaser (Via.)

Since it’s apropos to our work here, I’ll also excerpt a few bits from #10:

…it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either.

In daily life we expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and not to misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labeled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labeled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher betrays our trust by knowingly selling us spoiled meat we go elsewhere.

As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Our meat is information.

I ended Wednesday saying that I find the WOMMA’s "Honesty ROI" to be correct, consistent, and almost totally uninformative. Obviously, I implied, we’d like to have an ethical code that is deeply informative, one that can give us useful guidelines for handling a variety of situations in satisfactory ways. While the WOMMA are right (as we have long attested) that not telling lies is a correct ethical guideline for marketers to follow, we’d like to see a code that gives us a little bit more.

Of course, it’s one thing to merely criticize, and quite another to make some positive steps toward a code like that. The latter is our objective today.

Which means that you’re going to have to pardon me, because I’m about to get a little philosophical.

Immanuel Kant thought just about as hard as anyone about promises

Fans of German philosophy (like myself) may recall that Immanuel Kant, in his various writings on practical reason, used promise-keeping as a paragon moral activity for one of his four types of moral duties. Kant’s considered promise keeping a perfect duty to others, which means that he meant it to be a constitutive goal (rather than the regulative imperfect duties) toward our fellow human beings. It is our duty, Kant suggested, to keep our promises, because the formal moral law that underwrites all specific moral duties is that we ought to act in such a way that our actions are universalizable. This means that we only ought to decide to do something if we can reasonably abide by the world that would result if everyone did it.

So, we are obliged to keep our promises precisely because if everyone broke their promises, the entire system of promise-making would collapse in on itself, and promises would cease to have any of the attributes we commonly associate with promises.

Some years later, in his famous critique of Kant in the Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel wrote that while Kant’s moral law was correct, it was wholly uninformative. This is because, he said, that while the moral law could tell you that keeping promises was moral, it could only do so by relying on certain normative practices which the moral law could not validate. To wit: While the moral law can tell us something about keeping a promise, it can only do so by assuming the value of the system of promise-making in general, about which it can tell us nothing. Hegel thought, and I agree, that the (unanswered) latter question was the interesting one, ethically.

This is an incredibly nuanced question when approached in the wider context of total human ethicality, but, I want to argue, this critique can probably be deployed here with significantly less difficulty. Adopting the maxim not to tell lies in a marketing situation may be consistent, but it is only consistent inside the contingent premises of the marketing world in general. And, for my part, I think that any good code of ethics for a particular domain will have something to say about the domain in general. This is a significantly easier situation than the aforementioned, because here we have the wider set of normative ethical guidelines with which to critique those of the practice of (e.g.) marketing.

After all, as we approach this domain of ethics, it is important to remember that we are not designers (or advertisers, or technologists) first. First, we are human beings who design.

Paul is in Washington DC this week, on some top-secret DLB business. Hope to tell you all about it soon.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures from him at Tuesday’s Inauguration:

You will recall that on Monday, I presented the three aspects of the so-called Honesty ROI by the WOMMA. You may also recall that I expressed some reservations about the distinctness of the so-called R-rule and the I-rule. That’s where I’ll start today. I want to collapse the R-rule into the I-rule. I’ve thought about this, and I think that if a marketer fails to disclose her relationship to a company whose product she’s promoting, she’s ostensibly doing nothing more than violating the I-rule, because she fails to identify herself as a marketer, and thus tacitly represents herself as an average consumer. So there are really two rules now:

1. The RI-rule: Marketers should not masquerade as non-marketers.
2. The O-rule: Marketers should not enforce their own (or their employers’) opinions on consumers.

One will quickly note that the RI-rule is logically entailed by the first premise of the DLB branding syllogism (recall: P1. The internet means that people will find out if you’re lying, so you’d better tell the truth. P2. Telling the truth about bad products or policy is bad for business. C. Therefore, you need good products and policies.).

As to the O-rule, let’s clarify: How exactly would a marketer enforce an opinion on a consumer? Perhaps one of two ways: by force or by coersion. Now, I think we can all agree that marketers should not enforce their opinions by force on consumers (that is force them to endorse that opinion either publically – presumably by threat – or privately – presumably by brainwashing) even if they could. This suggests that the contentful point here is that marketers should not coerce consumers into sharing the opinions of the companies the marketers represent.

Coersion itself can take two forms. First, they could coerce consumers by bribes (money, stuff, etc.). However, in this case, the consumers would seem to merely become paid marketers. Logically followed through, this implies that the companies who paid the original set of marketers in the first place were guilty as well, and thus that marketing altogether is unethical. This (although definitely interesting enough to return to at a later time) is clearly not what they mean.

Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images, 1928–29)

Alternatively, consumers could presumably be coerced by the standard bag of advertising tricks. You may recall that I’ve argued at some length that these kinds of tricks are no longer feasible, and that this fact is entailed by the branding syllogism as well. Secondarily, you will note that advertising tricks are also lies, which suggests that the entire Honesty ROI comes down to the first premise of the DLB branding aphorism: Don’t lie.

Which all means that I find the Honesty ROI to be both correct and consistent. However, I also find it to be profoundly uninformative. It doesn’t give us anything but the most marginal possible set of guidelines for comporting ourselves in a marketing situation, and it doesn’t generate any ethical results that aren’t derivable from the technical character of the predominant conveyance of word of mouth marketing, the Internet.