Promises, Promises
For the rest of the year, DLB is going to talk about trust and promising in advertising. Today, I set up the problem.
If you’ve read much BlogLESS during the last few months, you’re probably familiar with our branding aphorism. If not, in slogan form it looks like this: Be good. Because if you’re not, and you lie about it, people will find out.
We’ve noted, though, that sometimes it seems like brands continue to be effective despite their truth-telling practices having fuzzy edges. For the next two weeks, we want to look at why we trust brands, advertising and companies. This is, of course, a deep topic, and one that sits right at the heart of what DLB’s all about — design ethics. Today, I’ll slowly set that discussion up.
Trust, Promising
Brands and advertisements are promises: Drink Coke and you will be vital; invest in Prudential mutual funds and you will have a comfortable retirement; watch 30 Rock and you will laugh. Brands and advertising take this form in order to produce trust precisely because promises have a significant role in producing trust generally. They facilitate all types of social coordination and cooperation. Treaties, contracts, and oaths are other types of promises. In other words, they are what consumers expect.
For the sake of this week, let’s call advertising the art of figuring out which promises a company can make in order to generate consumer desire, and let’s call branding the art of figuring out which promises a company should make in order to generate consumer trust. Advertising deploys promises to sell products, and a brand is a sort of general promise that provides the guidelines for what kinds of particular promises are acceptable on behalf of a given company.
Overview of posts to come
Today I introduced the problem of trust, and insinuated that the problem of trust (branding) emerges from the kinds of promises a company makes. I’m going to use the rest of my year’s worth of blog posts to talk about promising, and I hope to come back around to trust on December 31. On Wednesday, Friday, and Monday, I’ll be talking about the kinds of strategies I’ve noticed that advertisers use to deploy promises, hopefully drawing some general conclusions about the promise-making practice in advertising. Then, on the last day of the great year of 2008, I’ll review what I’ve written so far, attempt to draw some conclusions, and hopefully tie it all back in to the core issue: trust.
Personally, I am very excited about this topic. I hope you’ll keep checking in.
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