The Goodness 500 has a premise we at DLB can agree with: help consumers find the most socially responsible companies in an aesthetically pleasing way.

However, looking at the companies in their rankings, I question their definition of good. There are quite a few companies I wouldn't think to see on this list, particularly the large number of financial institutions.

The rankings appear to be gleaned from several public reports on charity donations, equality, and environmental policy. These issues are important, but don't tell the whole story. What company would allow itself to look bad on one of those reports when anyone (like Goodness) can easily look up such numbers? Donate some money, follow the rules, and everything looks fine. Meanwhile, the company might use child labor or issue bogus loans. Much more difficult to look up.

What's missing is the ethical dimension. I'd like to see a Goodness 500 that really quantifies trust and fairness, not the Goodness-On-Paper 500...

via the Independent

Google, famous for flying the corporate "do no evil" flag, is accused of -- and this is putting it mildly -- a lackluster commitment to practicing what they preach. Threat Level asserts that their regular claims to championing freedom of information (as evinced on Google's public policy blog among other places) are inconsistent with the "real facts".

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As we all know by now, in the aftermath of Iran's June 12 presidential elections, Iranians have increasingly taken to the streets in protest of the election's hotly disputed results. We know this in large part due to the fact that many of those Iranians have been using Twitter to swap information and inform those of us here in the outside world about what's going on in Tehran.

This is no doubt a triumph for the company and even for the role of technology in democracy more broadly. Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, is perhaps sentimental but certainly not entirely wrong in asserting that "the days when regimes can control the flow of information are over."

Photo from the recent Tehran protests, posted by Flickr user .faramarz.

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The Fall of Man, Lukas Cranach the Elder

Namely, it indicates that 67% of consumers believe it's important to buy ethically responsible products, and that 51% of them are willing to pay more for those products. What's more, 28% of consumers avoid buying products from companies whose political and social positions they disagree with, while 17% have told others to stop buying products from those companies.

While none of comes as a surprise, exactly, there's another interesting statistic that might: according to the survey, 23% of consumers say they have "no way of knowing" if a product does what it claims. To wit, there what appears to be a statistically verifiable "green trust gap." Now, why might that be the case?

Raphael Bemporad, co-founder of BBMG, says the findings mean that marketers need to better communicate with consumers and be more transparent. DLB's official response? Well, duh.

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.

A while back, we brought up the dilemma of balancing business with authority. How can experts like designers be trusted not to misuse their expertise for the sake of profit?

In that same post, I suggested that a potential solution to the problem of trusting authority is a code of ethics. Today, I want try and connect this idea with some of our previous writing and state that a code of ethics is a form of branding.

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