Civil Branding
Are brands the source of society's values? If so, is it up to marketers to make the world a better place?
Civil Branding is a website-slash-whitepaper developed by London marketing firm, Brandinstinct. Their argument is that 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.
It’s interesting to think about the trend of brands promoting values rather than product quality — e.g. instead of making statements like “Dove moisturizes skin better than soap”, we hear “Dove believes everyone is beautiful, even if they don’t look like a model”. I appreciate the civil branding take that an ad like this works towards the greater social good, but the cynic in me says it’s just another form of “it’s toasted”: making unkeepable promises.
For one thing, companies can’t exactly compete on social values the way they do on, say, battery life or color selection. It’s pretty tough for Burger King to be against genocide more than McDonald’s. For another, what does it really take for a company to “have values”? By and large, all a company has to do is create some ads and donate some money to a cause. We might say promises about values are unkeepable because the stakes aren’t realistic. If Burger King fails to stop genocide, we’re not going to blame them.
It’s also possible that, by their very nature, companies can’t keep meaningful promises about values. I am reminded of the documentary The Corporation which claims that if most corporate entities were examined as people, they would be diagnosed as psychopaths, showing “callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law”.
For instance, Brandinstinct cites Citibank’s “Live Richly” campaign as an example of civil branding. Here, a bank takes the unusual step of promoting the idea that there is more to life than the pursuit of money. 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. Civil branding implies that companies themselves are civil instruments. I question whether they are.
We’ve said before that brands are promises kept. The viability of civil branding rises and falls with whether you believe companies can deliver on promises of value.
| Tagged with: | Branding, Civil Branding, Design Ethics, Marketing |
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Comments on this post
1.
I am glad you raised the point about being a good corporate citizen. For some reason, many people feel that being a good corporate citizen is about which charity or causes a company chooses to endorse. As you say, this approach will not provide differentiation since only so many companies can be about saving farmers in Africa.
However, if we step back, we clearly realise that being a good corporate citizen encompasses many aspects including keeping promises, being responsible with their advertising, being good with staff, being a positive role model in the community, etc.
Civil Branding is about setting a vision for the organisation that will be good for society and the company. We want to uncover narratives in the culture of the company that are constructive for the rest of society and can guide all activities from advertising to employee policies and selecting the causes to get behind.
Just as there are (too) many examples of company’s not being good corporate citizens, there are many that are going a good job. The Civil Branding effort will focus on companies that are doing a good job on promoting progressive messages to society. Other fights against hyper-consumerism, the environment and CSR issues are being fought for by other efforts.
We believe that generating progressive messages out there has the ability to change culture inside and have ancillary benefits on other efforts too. We observed this phenomenon with several companies out there, most notably Dove/Unilever. The new campaign led to a change in company culture and in social activity. It’s notable that living up the promise was prompted by the success of the campaign and that this promotion had an irreversible effect on the culture.
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