This past April, the Journal of Marketing Communications published a study that suggests that men with facial hair were perceived as more credible than men who were clean shaven when endorsing products.

Apparently, bearded men were seen to have "more expertise" and to be "more trustworthy" than the un-bearded men. Important clarification: the study looked only at "neat" beards of medium length. Read more.

Beard Font by Tim Yarzhombeck, via.

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!"

Kevin McCullagh has a really nice writeup of his thoughts on the recent The Big Rethink conference at Core77. Among many fine reflections on the profession, one thread of his discussion should be of particular interest to the BlogLESS crowd.

The Problem

Conference chair Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran "began by throwing down a hefty gauntlet to design. He explained that the world faces crises on many different levels, not only economic and environmental: politicians and corporate leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy. This, in turn, has triggered a loss of confidence in the old ways of doing things and has led business and governments to cast around for new ideas. As design thinking is offering itself up as a process to solve many of these problems, what has it got to offer? Gulp!"

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, via.

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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.