Almost a year ago now, I advanced the argument that when your brand-reality dissonance is totally obvious, it puts people on the defensive, and ends up hurting your product. Nick and Design Observer recently introduced me to an interesting new test case for this idea, the Chevy Volt.

"What is 230?" From a Chevrolet Volt teaser ad campaign, Summer 2009

As the Observer points out, the 230 MPGGE (miles per gasoline gallon equivalent) figure comes from an experimental scenario devised by the EPA. They also point out that "all MPG tests are to some extent arbitrary...but this method is especially random." In other words, your mileage may vary -- a lot.

It's also interesting to note that GM didn't actually seem to need the 230 scheme to make the Volt attractive. It is attractive, running for your first 40 driving miles on electricity and then getting 50 MPG on gasoline. This strikes me as yet another case where a little bit of advertising restraint could have staved off a smattering of negative publicity, publicity you don't want when you're out there making an ethical appeal to consumers.

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.

On Monday, I referenced a blog post written by Eric Clemons at TechCrunch. Clemons' post states that advertising on the internet will fail, to which I added "unless it takes its medicine". I also mentioned that there were a variety of interesting points he made along the way. I'd like to highlight one of these today. It's about Google.

Clemons puts a fairly fine point on it: "Misdirection [is] sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model."

Google itself espouses a serious commitment to not misdirecting its users: "...while we believe relevant ads can be as useful as actual search results, we don't want anyone to be confused about which is which."

And indeed in this case, I wonder whether it really is fair to suggest that Google ads "misdirect" users. Recall that in 2002, the Federal Trade Commission issued a set of guidelines which specified that paid search ads be clearly labeled and delineated from other results. Google, today, indicates paid ads by marking them as "Sponsored," and placing them off to the side of their other search results.

In my mind, the only tenable way to argue that Google's business model relies on misdirection is by reference to the fact that some of its design decisions are manipulative. As any good web designer knows, people don't read on the web - they scan. By indicating that certain links are sponsored (e.g.) in a lighter text color, or off to the top right corner where it is known that the least amount of scanning eyes are prone to glance, etc., Google is "softly" misdirecting inattentive or inexperienced users.

If this argument doesn't hold water, then Google's BM does not rely on misdirection just because the relevant design decisions are ethically acceptable ones.

If that's all true, it is further fuel for the DLB fire. We need a way to decide whether a given design decision is an ethical one in order to bring clarity to a fuzzy case like Google's without relying on polemics. And I for one would certainly count it as fairly good evidence of the need for systematized design ethics if having it enabled us to evaluate whether or not Google "does no evil."

Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, recently wrote a highly controversial guest post at TechCrunch. It is a wealth of ideas worth considering, but its basic message is this: advertising on the internet will fail. Today I'm going to try and evaluate this conclusion. On Wednesday, I'll touch briefly on an interesting point he makes later in the article.

According to Clemons, advertising on the Internet will fail because of three states of affairs (hereafter, SOA):

1. People don't trust ads. (cf. BlogLESS, Remembering Promises)
2. People don't want ads. ("When do you leave the TV to get a snack?" he asks, "Is it during the content or the commercials?")
3. People don't need ads when they have friends and independent professional rating sites from which to obtain information. (cf. BlogLESS, Social Networking and Brands)

via Flickr

Now consider the following. SOA3 states that people don't need ads because other, more preferable resources are available to provide them with information. Clemens notes that "It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information." This means that SOA3 is the case if and only if SOA2 is the case. In other words, if people found ads sufficiently preferable, this would undermine the efficacy of SOA3. There are many thriving phenomena that consumers want but clearly do not need. For example, reality television.

Now, ask yourself why SOA2 is the case. Or better, ask Clemons, who takes up the question as he dismisses a certain practical alternative: "better targeting of ads using individual interests and individual behaviors will ensure that we do not bore or annoy as many people with each ad, but cannot address the trust issue." In other words, people do not want ads because they are noise. The messages contained in them are not worthy of consideration, and thus are perceived as useless cognitive clutter in the already messy space of the Internet.

This means that SOA2 would collapse if SOA1 was not the case. In other words, if people perceived that they could trust ads, they would become virtually indistinguishable from other contentful, potentially useful information on the Internet.This means that, advertising on the Internet will indeed fail, but only if it can't develop trust by making meaningful, keepable promises.

Of course, some of you will recognize this as what we've been talking about for the last year. We hope that Clemons' popular essay and findings provide further motivation for advertisers to work hard on developing strategies that Clemons himself may not have yet considered a feasible subset of advertising.

I spent Monday talking about making our first shaky steps toward a so-called deeper design ethics. I drew a distinction between generic professional or business ethics, and the special kind of ethical concerns we have as people who fill up the world with the stuff we make.

In that post, I specifically mentioned two types of advertising campaigns -- those for Kellogg's sugary breakfast cereals, and those for tobacco products -- both of which were pulled from television and print media because of the consensus view that it is our duty to protect those members of our society who are so impressionable that they cannot be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use the harmful products that these advertisements were trying to sell them. Of course I am referring to children.

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We've been on a solid run of fairly substantive posts recently, breaking a little ground in a lot of directions. Today, I thought I'd take a moment to try and encapsulate the heart of our December work on the role of promises play in advertising and design.

Promise to Return by Edward Bielejec

This thread probably starts with our consequentialist account of design, which motivated our positions on telling the truth (and therefore being ethical -- an observation which we couldn't help but notice Seth Godin echoing recently). For those who may not recall our first slogan, it's very simple: Be good. Because if you're not, and you lie about it, people will find out.

From there, it was a matter of simply asking how we were on the hook for our choices. The answer to this question was easy: because our livelihood is based on securing the trust of the consumers and constituents to whom we tailor our clients' products and services.

Now, the real work was ready to begin. Let's review it:

1. We get consumer trust by making promises, which we call advertisements.
2. There's no other way to get this trust, and this fact leads to all manner of advertising tricks. We covered promising almost nothing, merely insinuating something -- however implausible, or promising something vague.
3. All these tricks make consumers jaded. This exhausts many of the standard model advertisement options, a fact which leads advertisers to adopt an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general.
4. This ironic stance, though, undermines trust in the brand, which was what advertising was supposed to secure in the first place.
5. This all leads us to believe that it's not enough to merely tell the truth, you have to make meaningful promises that you can keep.

In slogan form: Brands are built on trust, which is only sustainable when built on meaningful promises kept.

Combining our two slogans has interesting results, which we will continue to explore in February.

I ended Wednesday saying that I find the WOMMA's "Honesty ROI" to be correct, consistent, and almost totally uninformative. Obviously, I implied, we'd like to have an ethical code that is deeply informative, one that can give us useful guidelines for handling a variety of situations in satisfactory ways. While the WOMMA are right (as we have long attested) that not telling lies is a correct ethical guideline for marketers to follow, we'd like to see a code that gives us a little bit more.

Of course, it's one thing to merely criticize, and quite another to make some positive steps toward a code like that. The latter is our objective today.

Which means that you're going to have to pardon me, because I'm about to get a little philosophical.

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