The whitepaper on Civil Branding compares the role of brands in today's society with those of church and state in the past. Brands now "engage [in] wider conversations about how we should think about ourselves as a society." They play a primary role in informing what we find important, and help us tune our perspectives on it. God help me, I think this is right. But the conclusion - that it is the duty of marketers to help brands advertise with value-based messages, to promote good values - is dead wrong.

When marketers suggest that companies undertake vague, value-based advertising campaigns that are contradicted by their unethical business practices, they are promoting a culture where values are handed down by institutions lacking the moral authority to do so. When companies use advertising to promote values that they don't instantiate, they drain the meaning out of those values.

Making value-based promises requires moral authority. If you're a marketer, and you help a company promote a value it doesn't instantiate, you're cheapening that value. You're making a world in which that value means less.

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.

Read More...

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.