So I spent a fair part of my weekend trolling the internet for information about the BP rebrand. But there was something that's been really bothering me: why does BP's clearly hypocritical branding strategy seem to be working (and indeed even on me)?

This was really sticking in my craw, not because I think the world of corporate branding is morally comprehensible, but because I honestly believed that brand hypocrisy didn't work. So BP's rebrand was chewing at me. Did I just miss the boat here?

The answer hit me in an unlikely place: the in the comments of an article about BP's recent technical woes at America's largest oil field. Let's read the comment that was my lightning rod.

The focus of the article was the numerous challenges faced by the oil industry in general. They even specifically mentioned that in an overview of the story. Guess it's easy and popular to take shots at BP.

Hold on. Why is it easy and popular?

I've got an idea.

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All this week we’ve been beginning to justify our position re: why design ethics are a good idea. I wrote on Tuesday that it’s reasonable, given a limited model of business transactions, to believe that poor ethics are advantageous. Yesterday, Paul wisely pointed out that with longer-term thinking, the smarter play is to be good. That’s where I’d like to start out today: pondering the ethics of the long game.

I can think of at least one way that design ethics can help a company succeed. It’s a simple idea, but one that I think builds upon many of the points we’ve brought up over the last few weeks here on BlogLESS.

The idea comes from an old Mark Twain quote:

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

To wit: being unethical takes more effort to maintain than being ethical. If you do something unethical, you have to watch your back, keep spinning the web of lies, and make sure that no one finds out. This takes resources away from your business: coordination, control, money, time, lawyers, etc. Of course, if someone does find out (and these days, it's a good bet they will), the price climbs even more.

All those resources allocated to sustaining unethical behavior would be better spent making the core business better. To dust off an old chestnut: don't sell the sizzle from a rotten steak. Invest in making a better steak and it sells itself.

In the long term, focusing on your core competency is going to pay off more than making something up or doing something underhanded.

Since your website is an important part of your brand, you've got to think about the content of the former as representative of the latter. You've just got to. To a potential consumer online, what your brand represents is nothing more than the content of your website. This means that if that content fails or is unconsidered in any significant (or, in fact, even in any seemingly insignificant) ways, your brand is in danger of representing this failure.

Given this framework, some decisions that may seem like good strategic ideas are in fact bad. The reason for this is an assumption on your part about your ability to provide a coherent semblance of total information, while at the same time actually providing either partial or exaggerated information. In a word, you're trying to trick, omit key information from, or (even worse) lie to your users. And it's not going to work.

"You guys don't have to trick me! You're my friends!"

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One of the questions that has been on my mind recently is, "what exactly happened on Wall Street last week, and why?" Thankfully, we have the New York Times' Freakonomics column, which offered a beautifully clear summary in a guest post by economists Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap on Thursday. I paraphrase what they say below.

1. The US Treasury nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 8, and has since replaced the management of both companies and will presumably oversee their operation.
2. On Monday, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history was made by Lehman Brothers.
3. On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve made a bridge loan to A.I.G., the largest insurance company in the world, securing the option to purchase up to 80 percent of the shares the company.

In short, the Fed has intervened on an unprecedented scale, in an unprecedented form, and in firms unprecedentedly far removed from its own supervisory authority. Wow! That's about the craziest thing that's happened in the financial universe since the Great Depression.

But why?

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Vista has problems. Paul doesn’t like it; Apple grabs market share while making fun of it. So what does Microsoft do? Fight back with science!

Microsoft recently conducted its own study where they showed users a new Windows operating system called “Mojave”. Subjects reported that they liked the new OS better than their current one (presumably XP). The catch is that it wasn’t a new operating system, it was Vista.

It reminds me of when the tobacco industry published its own research back in the 50’s. Suspicious? You bet.

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