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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.