A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the recent PR disaster at Domino's Pizza. To recap, Domino's suffered a major impact to brand perception as a viral video made by two less-than-savory employees in a Domino's kitchen rapidly and probably lastingly besmirched Domino's online presence.

I also noted that since this, media bloggers are in overdrive, trying to prepare damage control strategies to offer their clientèle in what everyone now understands are inevitable future instances of similar PR pandemics.

It strikes me, though, that in this instance an ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of cure. Or a ton.

While no one ought to attempt to justify the behavior of the two employees, it's worth considering that the whole incident might have been prevented if they had a different relationship to their employer. Many companies feel comfortable relying on the bad economy (or other mitigating factors) to motivate employees to perform well at their jobs. This means that these companies can jettison part of their own responsibility to help ensure satisfaction among their employees. Since they can, of course, they often do.

We all know, also, that there has been a particularly strong correlation established between happiness and productivity. We also know fewer Americans than ever are happy in their jobs. As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, when people are unhappy, they act out. Sometimes this means merely wasting company resources playing Solitaire all day, and sometimes it means making a video of yourself and your co-worker violating every health code known to man in your employer's kitchen, and then posting it on the Internet.

I don't have any strong evidence to demonstrate the relevance of these observations to this particular instance, but as a small business owner myself, I'm pretty sure they're worth considering.

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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I ran across a semi-recent interview published by the Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" site that's relevant to some of the things DLB likes to talk about. A recent paper of interviewees Profs. James E. Austin and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard focuses on the acquisitions of three small brands with some social cache ("virtuous mice") by three brands lacking that cache, but having instead piles of cash ("wealthy elephants"): (1) Tom's of Maine acquired by Colgate, (2) Stonyfield Farm Yogurt purchased by Danone, and (3) Ben & Jerry's bought by Unilever.

The authors write, "Making a virtuous mouse and rich elephant merger work is a delicate, but potentially high-value undertaking in terms of generating both greater economic and social value." This is the case when such a merger can help mice scale up rapidly and can provide terms of accountability for mice which are not so demanding as those of the market after an IPO. A merger can be good for an elephant because it allows them to explore "significantly new ideas and radically different business approaches," which are traditionally out of internal scope in terms of possible innovation.

Happily ever after?

Our question is predictable here: can these virtuous mice actually pull thorns from elephant feet, or rather are the mice destined to become mere value shills by virtue of the kinds of infrastructure and market commitments that they take on? Many elephants, the authors report, attempt to allow their mice to retain a high degree of organizational independence to prevent "brand contamination," but how plausible is this?

I can't help but think back to Nick's claim last week that corporate promises about values are generally unkeepable because the stakes aren't realistic. I'd add to this that this unkeepability might scale linearly with size. Tom's of Maine may stand for some values, but it's going to be progressively harder for that company to instantiate those values because being beholden to a corporate empire reduces their ability to take action on the kinds of ethical commitments they want to make. Presumably, part of what a mouse gets out of a merger is production and marketing infrastructure that was developed against a set of values that contradict those that the mouse has stood for in the past.

On the other hand, the authors note that "from a broader perspective, these fusions provide additional evidence that social enterprise is becoming an integral and embedded part of the marketplace and enriching the avenues for businesses to generate simultaneously commercial and social value." But even if we can concede that these social mergers are good in the sense that they promote social values, it seems equally clear that the companies doing the promotion can no longer instantiate those values (at least not as well). This in turn makes the promises on which the social enterprises are built less trustworthy. And we all know the rest.

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.

The Civil Branding website

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.

When we last left off, I was discussing the notion that a of code of ethics is a form of branding. I postulated that, in much the same way that a logo or a slogan represents a promise to one's customers and co-workers, a code of ethics performs a similar function -- albeit in a non-visual way.

Today, I want to present an example of a professional code of ethics that happens to have a visual expression.

The Order of the Engineer is a voluntary society of professionally-trained engineers who opt to take up the Obligation of an Engineer. The purpose of this enterprise is to remind engineers of their service to the public and to form a common bond among those in the profession.

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A while back, we brought up the dilemma of balancing business with authority. How can experts like designers be trusted not to misuse their expertise for the sake of profit?

In that same post, I suggested that a potential solution to the problem of trusting authority is a code of ethics. Today, I want try and connect this idea with some of our previous writing and state that a code of ethics is a form of branding.

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For the moment, I'm not going to deconstruct their visual rhetoric. Just look at the difference between the retro and the contemporary:

Compared to the old styling, the rabbit on the right is on crack. What does that say about us?

I haven't done a Less is Better in a while, but when I saw this I had to say something. Look at all the badges and banners on the box, check out that hyperkinetic rabbit and his meteorites of sugar flying at your face. It's practically screaming at you. I hadn't realized how desensitized I'd become-- that there could be any alternative but an aisle full of this corn-based cacophony.

TheDieline speculates that the retro rollout is an attempt to connect to nostalgia, perhaps to get adults to consider buying more cereal (ostensibly because of the tough economy). Instead of belt-tightening, wouldn't it be nice if it represented something else? Not asking people to buy something, but asking them to consider their values.

The Trix rabbit on the old box doesn't need to sell you anything. In fact, he's not even looking at you. He's just enjoying the cereal. The craziest thing about him is that he's got rollerskates on. He goes outside to play.

Silly rabbit.