The "Honest Store" promotion is pretty simple: Honest Tea (owned in largest part by Coca-Cola) set up unmanned kiosks in central city locations, offering their wares at an indicated price of a dollar a bottle. Of course, kiosks unmanned, payment was on the honor system. The catch, as you might expect, was that each kiosk was equipped with hidden cameras to decide which big-city folk are honest enough to cough up for their bottle.

Via NBC Chicago

How "honest" were people? The tallies vary from 75% (Los Angeles) to 93.3% (Boston), with New York and Atlanta falling between at 89%, and DC a nearby second-place at 93%.

We, at DLB, have got a few questions about this promotional scheme. First of all, it seems clear enough that what's being tested here isn't necessarily how honest people are, but — just as likely — people's wherewithal. Nobody in their right mind should be able to see an unmanned corporate kiosk in the age of social media without asking herself what the catch is. I'm inclined to think that the results of this experiment are just as germane to the claim that the citizens of Boston deliberate correctly at 93.3% as they are to the claim that the citizens of Boston act honestly at a rate of 93.3%.

But, esoteric and pragmatic worries to one side, I think the real question is this one: how honest is the honest store? Doesn't it strike a dubious note to test honesty with hidden cameras? Does tricking people into being dishonest for the sake of a promotion undermine the moral authority of the experimenters?

For the record, finally, all proceeds of the Honest Tea Honest Store social experiment are being donated to City Year, a non-profit organization that "unites young people of all backgrounds for a year of full-time service" in metropolitan areas. So, on the face of it, that seems good. But, of course, and with Milton Glaser (cf. §2) now, "C'mon!"

This is a kind of half of a post. It's really an invitation to read This is what I have learned (PDF) by Milton Glaser for the AIGA National Design Conference, "Voice" in 2002. Here, he condenses 50 years of practical design wisdom into ten succinct, often counter-intuitive points. I will merely list the points, but I promise, each one is worth a read.

1. You can only work for people that you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more.
6. Style is not to be trusted.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right.
10. Tell the truth.

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You will recall that on Monday, I presented the three aspects of the so-called Honesty ROI by the WOMMA. You may also recall that I expressed some reservations about the distinctness of the so-called R-rule and the I-rule. That's where I'll start today. I want to collapse the R-rule into the I-rule. I've thought about this, and I think that if a marketer fails to disclose her relationship to a company whose product she's promoting, she's ostensibly doing nothing more than violating the I-rule, because she fails to identify herself as a marketer, and thus tacitly represents herself as an average consumer. So there are really two rules now:

1. The RI-rule: Marketers should not masquerade as non-marketers.
2. The O-rule: Marketers should not enforce their own (or their employers') opinions on consumers.

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I talked a couple of weeks ago about how so-called social media can help your company's branding effort, and what that means about conducting your business. It is pretty obvious that social media is a (relatively) new kind of marketing game, which would seem to imply a new set of rules as well. Given that, I'd like to spend this week to being feeling out the ethical terrain of designing and strategizing with social media.

The pretty clear place to start this (at least according to Google) is looking at the published ethics code for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Word of mouth marketing is the heart of most social media campaigns, and WOMMA has been advocating it since 2005. According to their mission, they employ an ethical code as part of their core strategy.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The heart of the WOMMA code is the so-called "Honesty ROI," a name which should strike at least a tangential chord with us DLB types, given our insistence on the critical role of keeping meaningful promises in all types of corporate design and marketing. The R.O.I. in question here cashes out to: Relationship, Opinion, Identity. This week, my plan is to look at each of these points in turn, and evaluate the stance of the WOMMA against the stance that we've been developing. I'll look for both similarities and disjunctions, either of which will hopefully be instructive in our ongoing investigation of design ethics.

Today, I'll just paraphrase the WOMMA's position, and on Wednesday and Friday, I'll take it up in earnest.

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Mistakes are made. Technology fails. Deadlines are blown. Variables are left unaccounted for. In short, shit happens: unavoidably, inevitably. But what do we designers do when it does?

Glitches from a Google cache search in a tab of a crashing instance of Firefox (Via)

This week on BlogLESS, we'll take a look at some instructive instances of failure, and see what we can learn from them. We've talked up the importance of accountability in design ethics here on BlogLESS before, and anticipating failure and accounting for it gracefully is right at the heart of good design.

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