We were alerted this week (thanks Megan) to an interesting case of marketing/media ethics.

On the night of October 21st last year, Real Madrid played AC Milan in an important Champions League match. Heineken (under guidance of advertising agency JWT Milan, Italy) gave university professors, girlfriends, and various media outlets (hereafter, the foils) tickets to a classical music and poetry a concert that night. The foils, quite naturally, asked or required their students, boyfriends and employees (hereafter, the pawns) to go to the concert. Naturally, many of the pawns were nonplussed. Their (quite strong) preference was to watch Real Madrid/AC Milan, not to attend what they saw as a boring concert. Here's what happened.

Now ask yourself, what is the message to the pawns (the target market) here? I think it has to be this: "Heineken knows you better, and looks out for your interests better, than your professors, girlfriends, wives, and bosses. When your work, education, and family stand in the way of your happiness, count on the Heineken brand to save you."

That, by my lights, is a little perturbing.

1. Now this is how to market something

This harrowing video shows a skier wearing a helmet-cam, buried by an avalanche for several minutes and dug out by his friends. He survived the encounter because he was experienced, lucky, and had the right equipment. It was one of the most oddly compelling (if unintentional) marketing episodes I've ever witnessed.

Left: the viral video in question; Right: A Black Diamond Avalung

Before watching the video, I had no idea what an avalung was, but I do now. It's a device that helps skiers breathe easier if they get caught in an avalanche. According to the comments on the video, it probably saved the skier's life.

One wouldn't even dream of trying to stage something like this --a life or death situation-- for marketing purposes, but I can't get over how effective the whole experience was. To watch this event through this person's eyes and survive(!) was so compelling, I just had to learn more. I could see the value of the product and I was convinced even though I have no intention whatsoever of attempting such an activity. That's powerful stuff.

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1. Unilever's "Crowdsourcing" Outted as High-Tech Spec

Unilever, which encompasses dozens of popular brands such as Lipton, Bertolli, and Slim-Fast, fired the ad agency representing Peperami (British Slim Jims) and replaced it with what it calls a crowdsourcing solution.

But while most crowdsourcing involves leveraging the collective intelligence of a group for mutual benefit, Unilever marketed the call for ad ideas to professional ad agencies only. Moreover, they are offering a $10,000 bounty to the winning idea. Sound familiar? It's the classic spec work pitch.

They should crowdsource a packaging designer, too....

Advertising Age called them on it:

Crowdsourcing at its core is about mass collaboration. Unilever's move, on the other hand, is nothing of the sort. Unilever is looking for no collaboration here. What it is looking for is to get lots of high-quality creative ideas at a significantly lower price. End of story.

UPDATE: There appears to be a whole section on NO!SPEC regarding unethical crowdsourcing practices!

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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.