Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category
Philip Morris: Endangering Kids and Academic Ethics
Filed under: accountability, children, ethics, health, law, marketing, product safety, rights |
Comments (4) Tobacco giant Philip Morris is doing its best to get its hands on research about teen smoking, and encouraging some UK academics to violate ethical standards along the way.
Here’s the story, by Andrew Hough for the Telegraph: Philip Morris: tobacco firm using FOI laws to access secret academic data
Philip Morris International has tried to force the University of Stirling to hand over secret data into teenage smoking and cigarette packaging gathered over more than a decade.
The manufacturers behind the popular Marlboro brand, have used Freedom of Information laws to [attempt to] gain access [to] about 6000 confidential interviews undertaken with teenagers as young as 13, which discuss their views on smoking and tobacco….
The researchers are rightly fighting the request.
It’s a shocking move on Philip Morris’s part, even just from a PR point of view. To be seen seeking information that the company clearly hopes to use in marketing to children will do nothing to improve anyone’s opinion of the firm or the industry.
But there’s a second wrong, here, and that lies in the attempt to get the researchers in question to violate their obligations to the research subjects — the children and their parents — who participated in the research in question.
When university-based researchers conduct any kind of research on human beings, they are required to adhere to pretty strict standards for research ethics. The most fundamental of those standards has to do with obtaining informed consent from research subjects. Such consent may be obtained only after research subjects are fully informed about the goals of the research, as well as about what sorts of privacy protections they can expect. In the case described here, it is almost certainly the case that the children interviewed, and their parents, would have been assured that while the researchers would of course eventually make public the aggregate results of their research, the raw data — the interview transcripts that Philip Morris seems to be seeking — would of course be kept confidential.
So Philip Morris is asking these researchers to break their promise and to breach the trust placed in them by research subjects. The company is attempting to get the researchers to violate their duty. This puts the company’s behaviour into the same moral category as suborning perjury or intentionally putting another party into a conflict of interest. It’s a bad thing when a company violates its own duties; but it is especially corrosive to work so hard at encouraging other people to violate theirs.
PETA Promises Porn With a Purpose
Filed under: activism, advertising, entertainment, food, marketing, NGO, protest, sex, strategy |
Comments (1) Is it just me, or has PETA jumped the shark? The always-provocative animal-rights organization is at it again, this time announcing that it’s planning on starting its own porn site to draw attention to the plight of animals. And once again it’s alienating groups that it ought to consider allies.
See this version of the story, by Madeleine White, for the Globe and Mail: PETA to launch porn website: Is this still about animal rights?
The animal rights group, known for its naturalist ways, has registered the domain name peta.xxx and plans to launch a pornography website in December that “draws attention to the plight of animals….”
Not surprisingly, many feminists (in the broadest sense of the term) have objected. The general line of argument is that you’re not really accomplishing anything if you’re raising awareness for one cause (say, animal suffering) by doing damage to another cause (say, sexual equality). When PETA uses naked bodies, they are almost always female bodies, portrayed and instrumentalized as sex objects. Porn, in other words, is pretty problematic as a consciousness-raising tool.
Now none of this assumes that all porn is automatically a bad thing. It is, by definition, naughty, and certainly controversial, but there’s little reasoned objection against portrayals of nudity or sexuality per se. Any sane objection has to be rooted in things like objectification, which is not a necessary ingredient of porn, though it is certainly a common one. Of course, no one knows yet just what kind of porn PETA has in mind, but the group’s history suggests that we shouldn’t expect anything terribly progressive.
Why does the group use such tactics in the first place? PETA claims that they have no choice:
Unlike our opposition, which is mostly composed of wealthy industries and corporations, PETA must rely on getting free “advertising” through media coverage.
But that’s not exactly true. According to PETA’s financial report, the organization has about a $36 million budget, overall, out of which it spends about $11 million on “Public Outreach and Education.”
It perhaps goes without saying that any for-profit corporation that tried to set up such a website to draw attention to its product would draw fire, too. But of course it is utterly unthinkable that Coca-Cola or Microsoft would set up an entire porn site just to draw attention to their products. That’s not to say that lots of companies don’t use sex in their advertising, but no mainstream company would ever go so far as to use actual porn to reach an audience. But then, PETA isn’t a for-profit corporation, but rather a not-for-profit corporation, one that exists to promote animal rights. But is objectification of female bodies for a cause different than objectification of female bodies for money, ethically speaking? PETA will surely say “yes.” After all, this is porn for a good cause, not just for its own sake, and not just to generate filthy profits. But it’s worth remembering that PETA’s values, and the goals it seeks, are far from universal. We’re not talking about, say, world hunger or literacy. And there are all kinds of for-profit companies that produce products that make the world a better place in tangible, agreed-upon ways.
Maybe the problem with PETA isn’t (just) that their campaigns objectify women, but that they are cavalier about doing so. They’re single-minded in pursuit of their objectives, and sex is just one more tool for them to use in pursuing it. An organization that’s supposedly committed to getting us to think about the plight of animals can’t afford to be seen as clueless about other ethical issues.
Pepsi Under Pressure
Filed under: activism, brands, CEOs, competition, consumers, corporate citizenship, food, health, marketing |
Comments (3) It’s not easy selling carbonated sugar-water. Or rather, the selling part is all too easy. The hard part is steering a course between the conflicting desires of shareholders and activists. Shareholders want profits. That means selling more of high-profit-margin products like Pepsi and Doritos. Activists want companies to stop pushing unhealthy products like Pepsi and Doritos, and to focus on healthier — but less profitable — products.
See this story, by Mike Esterl and Valerie Bauerlein, for the WSJ: PepsiCo Wakes Up and Smells the Cola
…The snack-food and beverage giant is launching the first new advertising campaign for its flagship Pepsi-Cola in three years—offering one of the most visible signs PepsiCo is throwing new weight behind its biggest brand after it sank to No. 3 in U.S. soda sales last year, trailing not only Coke but Diet Coke….
When industry market share numbers came out in March, showing Pepsi-Cola slipped to No. 3, analysts quickly accused PepsiCo—and Chairman and Chief Executive Indra Nooyi—of taking their eyes off the company’s biggest brand….
There’s a lesson here for activists who think that reforming corporate behaviour is a simple matter of willpower, that companies can shift to healthier foods (or to less-violent video games) if only they had the guts to try it. Shifting your business practices in a way not endorsed by consumers is, well, a recipe for disaster.
Then again, maybe that’s a pretty decent outcome, from an activist’s point of view.
What’s the long-term prognosis? An ebb and flow of corporate strategy, in response to a range of pressures. Activists will win a few battles, as well as surely losing a few. Forcing companies to do what you want means forcing consumers to consume what you want. Because as everyone in business knows, while it’s simply not true that “the customer is always right,” it surely is true that the customer is always the customer.
Should a Catholic Charity Take Money from Hooters?
Filed under: brands, charity, marketing, philanthropy, protest, scandal |
Comments (5) This is twice in two weeks that I’ve blogged about Hooters. I swear it’s a coincidence.
From MSNBC: Catholic charity says ‘no’ to Hooters fundraiser
St. Patrick Center, a Catholic charity that provides assistance to homeless people, has canceled a Thursday fundraising “Dine and Donate” event with a downtown Hooters restaurant after drawing complaints that such a collaboration wasn’t in keeping with the Christian faith….
This is not exactly an isolated incident. Charities of all kinds have to decide, on a pretty much constant basis, who they’ll accept money from and who they want to associate with. In some cases, the struggle is an internal one; in other cases, it’s the result of external criticism. (Just look at the criticism UNICEF faced for making a deal with Cadbury.)
It’s worth pointing out that a charity faces two different issues, here. One is simply the source of money. A charity might consider money from certain sources as ill-gotten gains. In such cases, the money from certain sources is going to be unwelcome, even if donated very discretely. In other cases, the issue is publicity. Some charities might be willing to take money from anyone, in principle, but worry about the impact of having their name associated with — well, with Hooters for example. These two issues (dirty money and a dirty reputation) are separable, at least in principle. But secrets are pretty hard to keep secret, especially in an era in which transparency is valued and in which corporate donors are relatively eager to publicize their good deeds to spit-shine their image. So really, the key concern is liable to be reputation.
And in terms of reputation, the anything-goes strategy seemingly suggested by some idealists is likely to be fatal to just about any charity. Those who think it’s “obvious” that St. Patrick Center, for example, should be happy and eager to take Hooters’ money should ask themselves: if Hooters is OK, how about the local strip club? How about a hardcore porn magazine? I’m not at all saying those various enterprises are all alike, in all morally-relevant ways. I’m just pointing out that most people will see some place where they would like a line drawn. And ethics bleeds into prudence here. Most charities have reputation and goodwill as their only real capital. A company that makes cars can recover from scandal by, well, making good cars. You don’t have to love the company to love the cars. But an organization whose only real asset is its reputation — well, sully the reputation and you’re pretty much sunk.
But then, neither can your typical cash-strapped charity afford to be too prissy about sources of cash. Look too closely at any donor and you’re very likely to find skeletons in the closet.
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Thanks to Tara Ceranic for showing me this story.
Beer, Burgers, and Pretty Girls
As business models go, it’s all pretty straightforward: beer, fried food, and pretty girls who smile a lot and show some skin. And it’s successful, too. The ‘Hooters’ chain has made a lot of money that way, but so have a number of other chains. For evidence, see this story by Jason Daley, for Entrepreneur: ‘Breastaurants’ Ring Up Big Profits.
Franchises inspired by the Hooters model–such as Celtic-themed sports bar chain Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery and faux mountain sports lodge chain Twin Peaks–have expanded rapidly over the last half decade, while corporate-owned chains like Brick House Tavern + Tap and Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke are picking up steam regionally. In fact, for the next couple of years, this segment (often referred to as “breastaurants”) is poised to be one of the fastest-growing restaurant categories….
OK, so it works. But it is also a business model that draws its share of criticism. A man doesn’t have to be a total prude to find himself thinking, “hmm…would I want my daughter / girlfriend / sister working there?” And if not, “why am I so comfortable with other people’s daughters / girlfriends / sisters working there?”
And being vaguely “uncomfortable” with such restaurants (if that’s your reaction) is a perfectly reasonable moral position. This is just the kind of case to use to illustrate the point that ethics doesn’t have to be done in terms of binary, go-or-no-go, ethical-or-unethical evaluation. The ethics of a business model that uses sex (or at least the idea of sex) to sell food is pretty grey. It’s easy to sketch a very rough kind of ethical justification of that business model, cast in terms of a commercial transaction between consenting adults, etc. It’s also easy to prejudge the situations, intentions, and attitudes of the women who work at a place like Hooters, and to cry out “exploitation” without truly understanding, say, the point of view of an actual Hooters Girl. But both of those options are too quick, and neither does much to increase our understanding. But it’s also worth seeing that refusal to opt for either extreme is not the same as shrugging your shoulders — it can be a principled point of view.
Besides, restaurants like Hooters or Tilted Kilt are part of a much larger spectrum, along which various restaurants and chains locate themselves. You certainly don’t have to go to a “mancave” restaurant of that sort in order to see either short shorts or low-cut tops on the waitresses and bartenders. That’s not justification for any particular business practice, but it is reason to question singling out particular chains for especially harsh criticism. And it’s also worth noting that in many cases, outside of these chains, it’s individual waitresses who make their own wardrobe decisions. Again, that fact doesn’t obviate the option of (or indeed the need for) social critique; it just means that we can’t reasonably roll our eyes at the very notion of a place like Hooters, and then merrily skip down to the neighbourhood bar where the waitresses wear short skirts and tube tops all summer.
Finally, it’s tempting to think there’s a sort of arms race going on here: that restaurants in this category (and some individual waitresses) will compete by having skimpier and skimpier outfits. But that seems unlikely. For one thing, the picture painted in the Entrepreneur piece is much more complicated than the ‘beer-and-boobs’ stereotype. Cleavage and short skirts may get men (in particular) through the door, but any restaurant that wants return business is going to have to do more than that. After all, if it were just about the boobs, then the “businessman’s lunch” offered by many strip clubs would be a lot more popular.
Naomi vs Cadbury
Filed under: advertising, brands, discrimination, food, marketing, protest, snacks |
Comments (3) Racism is one of the last things any company wants to be accused of. Of all the kinds of corporate wrongdoing, racism is one of the hardest to defend against. For one thing, there’s not much “on the other hand.” It’s not like child labour, where you can say yeah, it’s unfortunate, but on the other hand these kids really do need the income. Racism is just bad, with no upside. The other problem is that racism (or at least accusations of same) can arise without anyone having racist intentions, let alone racist corporate policies.
See, for example, this story, by Mark Sweney for The Guardian: Cadbury apologises to Naomi Campbell over ‘racist’ ad:
Confectionery giant Cadbury has apologised to Naomi Campbell after the supermodel claimed an advert comparing her to one of its chocolate bars was racist.
The advert for Cadbury’s Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate bars used the strapline “Move over Naomi, there’s a new diva in town”….
Now, the ad isn’t necessarily racist. Campbell certainly is a diva (in the negative sense of that word) regardless of her skin colour. The word carries connotations of success, popularity, and glamour, as well as (more recently, I think) more than a touch of spoiled brattiness. Campbell certainly fits the bill, and so it wouldn’t be surprising if any ad using the word “diva”, regardless of what it is advertising, referred to her. And, as a matter of logic, to say that both Campbell and a chocolate bar are in the same category (i.e., “diva”) is not to say that Campbell herself is a chocolate bar. So I suspect the intention probably wasn’t racist, even in a passive, thoughtless way. But who knows what the ad’s makers were thinking? Maybe it really was a reference to ‘chocolatey skin,’ the kind of reference that, like many other racial terms or allusions, is probably best left for self-referential use by members of the relevant groups. Anyway, the perception that the ad was racist is there, and that’s enough: enough both to result in genuinely hurt feelings and to generate a serious PR problem. So yes, it’s good that Cadbury retracted the ads.
You’ve got to wonder how it is that all the smart people at Cadbury (including their PR department) and at their ad agency (Fallon), didn’t see this coming. Surely someone there must have realized that this is dangerous turf. Why didn’t someone raise a red flag? Is the “can-do” attitude there so strong that no one had the sense to say “wait a minute”? One way or the other, this case raises issues about corporate culture, whether in terms empowering employees to speak up, or, as Campbell herself rightly suggests, in terms of fostering diversity (of all kinds) at the level of senior management.
Finally, it must be somewhat galling for Cabury to be lectured to by Naomi Campbell, queen of disreputable behaviour. Ms Campbell’s own history of questionable behaviour doesn’t rob her critique of its force, but I guess it does make her something of an expert on the offering and timing of public apologies.
Shoe Shine Ethics, Again
Two months ago I blogged about the Ethics of Shoe-Shine Pricing, based on my experience at an airport shoe-shine stand. I was particularly interested in the relationship between base price and tipping behaviour. I noted that pricing decisions by businesses might well have a substantial impact on customers’ tipping behaviour, by making it more or less convenient, for example, simply to “round up” to the nearest dollar (or currency denomination). Case in point: I was charged $6.75 to have my shoes shined, and gave the guy a ten. It occurred to me that, had the price been $8.00 instead, I would have given the guy the same ten, but the resulting tip would have been substantially smaller.
Well, I’m back at the airport, and just had my shoes shined. And guess what: the price has gone up. I was charged $8.00, and, yes, as predicted I gave the guy a ten-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. In other words, rather than tipping on any principled basis, I did what was convenient. I suspect the vast majority of customers do the same.
Whoever decided to raise the price from $6.75 to $8.00 may not have thought about a couple of secondary effects of that decision (not that consciousness of these effects would necessarily have altered the decision). One secondary effect is that he or she reduced employees’ tips by $1.25 per shine (assuming most people tip roughly the way I do). That’s a big cut, big enough that it probably ought not to be made thoughtlessly.
The other effect of this pricing decision is of course the effect on the customer. The obvious effect is that a shoe-shine now puts a slightly larger dent in the customer’s wallet. But then, an airport shoe-shine is pretty clearly a luxury good (if a very minor one), and so it’s pretty easy to avoid the price change simply by forgoing the service. But less obviously, the customer now finds it slightly less easy to engage in a minor act of beneficence, namely the act of overtipping. Note that, back when the price was $6.75, my $10 payment amounted to nearly a 50% tip, which is crazy when compared to the 15-20% that most people aim at in response to good service at a restaurant. But shoe-shine customers who are anything like me are still going to do the easy thing (i.e., give the guy $10), even after the change in price. My evidence here is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that people generally value being handed the opportunity to engage in small, reasonably pain-free acts of kindness or generosity. I must admit that, back when I was charged just $6.75, I felt kind of good about having given the guy a “big” tip (percentage-wise) and it made me feel good about the whole shoe-shine experience. Today, the $8 shoe-shine cost me exactly the same (after tip), and the service was just as good, but I went away without that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, having given the guy a “mere” 25% tip.
It’s interesting to note that the ethics of pricing is virtually virgin territory, from an academic point of view. There’s practically nothing on the topic in the scholarly literature on business ethics, aside from a few journal articles on price gouging, a some stuff on price fixing in textbooks, and of course a bit of work on the pricing of executive talent. I’ve always assumed that the paucity of work on the topic has something to do with the fact that pricing is seldom seen (from the outside, at least) as a choice. In theory, at least, companies charge “what the market will bear,” and that tends to mean a number dictated by a combination of consumer demand and the availability of competing products. But for many products, pricing is in fact a choice, and I think the ethics of pricing is far more complex and interesting than most people realize.
Bragging About Not Recycling
Filed under: environment, honesty, marketing, quality, transparency, values |
Comments (4) 
Recycling is cool, right? It’s hip to be green, right? Well, apparently that’s not always the case.
I spotted this sign at a carwash here in Toronto yesterday. This carwash (the labour-intensive handwash kind) is proud of the fact that its water is always fresh, never recycled. In 2011, it’s a striking way of bragging.
Two points worth making:
First, any business that brags about using a resource in the least frugal way possible is perhaps, just perhaps, paying too little for it. Now, from what I understand, water usage by businesses in Toronto is metered, though I don’t know just how expensive the water is for businesses. But it’s at least worth contemplating that, for a sometimes-scarce resource (and water counts as one of those, even in Canada) a business can only brag about maximal usage if it’s not paying very much for it in the first place. If we want to encourage people (and businesses) to use less water, the first step is to make sure usage is metered, and the second step is to make sure that prices are sufficient to discourage waste. Water is a public utility, and pricing is often subsidized in ways that encourages waste. Notice there are precisely zero airlines bragging about how much fuel they use.
The second thing worth noting is the basic value conflict here. Why is it that this company is bragging about using only fresh water? Presumably it’s because they or their customers associate fresh water with a better product, i.e., a better wash. Now, that belief might be mistaken. In fact, I strongly suspect it is mistaken. I suspect that recycling and filtering can easily get water clean enough to get your car 100% sparkly clean. But the perception that recycled water is inferior is out there, and it may be difficult to change. In the meantime, this remains an example of what many will experience as a difficult values-based choice: do you want the best product, or the greenest one? Sometimes, the greenest choice is also the best product, and when that’s true it’s either a happy coincidence or the result of really smart product development. But we must not allow clever marketing to convince us that that will automatically be the case, that green = ethical = happy = socially progressive. Life is full of choices, and that truth is one that we cannot afford to water down.
Profiting from Customers’ False Beliefs
Filed under: consumers, critical thinking, disaster, ethics, fraud, marketing, profits, science |
Comments (14) Is it ethical for a business to profit from its customers’ false beliefs? Or, more to the point, is it ethical to profit from your customers’ beliefs when you think those beliefs are false? What if you encourage those beliefs?
Case in point: a number of businesses have sprung up to take advantage of the fact that a number of fundamentalist Christians believe that May 21, 2011 (i.e., tomorrow) is the day on which “The Rapture” will happen, which will involve the return to earth of Jesus Christ, the rescue of believers, and the start of a process culminating in the destruction of the world in October. Enter the profit-seeking atheists. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, for example, will guarantee (for just $135) to come to a believer’s house, post-rapture, to rescue their pets. Salvation, after all, is for human believers only, so the faithful “know” that atheists and animals will be left behind. (For more details, and more examples, see this item from ABC News: May 21, 2011: Profiting on Doomsday?)
Profiting from this particular set of false (i.e., unsupported) beliefs seems, frankly, pretty innocuous. Those who hold such beliefs are few, and are liable to be mocked by the vast majority of Christians, who scoff at the idea that the exact date of the Rapture can be determined so precisely. When the Rapture ends up not happening (and I realize I’m going out on a limb, there) those who ponied up for the “service” offered by Eternal Earth-Bound Pets will be out $135, but other than that they’ll be no worse for wear. But what about other examples?
Let’s start with a fictional example to test our intuitions. What if I find out that you believe, for whatever reason, and despite the fact that you live far from any indigenous populations of elephants, that your rose garden is in imminent danger of being trampled by elephants. And let’s say you also believe (for whatever reason) that elephants are deterred by he sound of the revving of a Porsche engine. Am I justified in selling you a Porsche that you do not otherwise need, and that perhaps you cannot truly afford? Would that be predatory? Your belief, here, is clearly a crazy belief, and my profiting from your delusion seems not-quite-right. But then, as far as you’re concerned, I’m genuinely helping you. On the other hand, what if the reason you have that delusional belief in the first place is that I’ve convinced you of it?
Next, let’s get back to real-life examples. But let’s look at one that doesn’t revolve around a single event, like Rapture insurance does. What about, for example, selling homeopathy? Now, it’s one thing for a homeopath to prescribe and sell homeopathic treatments. After all, the homeopath presumably believes that such remedies work, in spite of the lack of evidence for that belief. Now, that belief itself might be culpable — if you’re going to sell a product, then ethically you ought to do what you can to make sure it really works — but at least the homeopath is selling in good (if misguided) faith. What about when licensed Pharmacists, people with the training to know perfectly well that homeopathic treatments cannot possibly work, sell them? That happens all the time. Shoppers Drug Mart, for example — Canada’s largest pharmacy chain — sells homeopathic treatments, and all the franchisees of that chain are required to be licensed Pharmacists. That is, they are people whose scientific training tells them that such remedies have zero scientific credibility. So they, too, are profiting from their customers’ false* beliefs — beliefs that they, the sellers, know to be false. Of course, the difference between selling homeopathy and selling Rapture insurance is that in the case of homeopathy, people’s lives really might be at stake.
Information is crucial to the efficient operation of a free market. Asymmetries of information constitute an entire category of situations in which economists will tell you market failures are liable to occur. Knowledge, alas, can never be perfect. So what we instead insist on is that transactions at least be made in good faith. It’s clear that that means the consumer needs to have enough information to know that the product she is about to buy will satisfy her desires; what’s less clear is whether the consumer must also know enough to know whether the product will satisfy her needs.
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*Note: some of you may want to quibble with my use of the word “false” to refer to beliefs in either a) the Rapture or b) homeopathy. You may point out that saying that there’s a lack of evidence for a particular belief isn’t the same as saying that that belief is false. That’s technically true. But when a belief is implausible on the face of it, is unsupported by evidence, and conflicts with a great number of beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, it is entirely reasonable to call it “false.” At least until the Rapture.
Pink Toenails, Gender Identity and Social Responsibility
Filed under: activism, advertising, children, corporate citizenship, CSR, culture, ethics, marketing, protest, values |
Comments (21) 
This one’s a real tempest in a teapot. Or rather, in a bottle of nail polish.
OK, so here’s the short version. Clothing chain J. Crew’s latest catalog includes a picture of president and creative director Jenna Lyons painting her young son’s toenails pink. Yes, pink — the colour most closely associated, in North American culture, at least, with traditional femininity. Criticism ensued, alleging that J. Crew was acting (intentionally!) to promote a gender-bending agenda. The calibre and cogency of the arguments in favour of that conclusion is about what you’d expect.
The main critic, Fox commentator and psychiatrist Dr Keith Ablow, provides an object lesson in how to cram as many argumentative fallacies as possible into a single piece of writing, in his oddly-titled editorial, “J. Crew Plants the Seeds for Gender Identity”. (I’ve blogged about the significance of logical fallacies before, here.) Among the good doctor’s fallacious arguments:
He alleges, without substantiation, that pink-toenail-painting is highly likely to result in gender confusion. In the absence of supporting evidence, we are expected to believe him because he’s got “Dr” in front of his name — essentially a form of illicit appeal to authority. He also engages in straw man argumentation (in which a critic attacks something his opponent never said nor implied), by suggesting that, via this ad, “our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity” [my emphasis]. He also begs the question by assuming that pink is just for girls (and I’m wearing pink as I write this, by the way). He also has an unfortunate tendency to resort to rhetorical questions: “If you have no problem with the J. Crew ad, how about one in which a little boy models a sundress? What could possibly be the problem with that?” (What if my answer is “nothing”? Ablow provides nothing to help me, then.) Ablow also commits the fallacy known as appeal to ignorance when he points out that the effect of “homogenizing males and females … is not known” (i.e., we don’t know that it’s safe, so it is probably unsafe.) He also makes use of an illicit slippery slope argument, suggesting comically that ads such as this are somehow going to result in the end of all procreation, and, hence, of the human race. And Ablow’s argument as a whole amounts to one giant, fallacious, appeal to tradition. I could quite literally teach the entire Fallacies section of my Critical Thinking class just by having students pick apart Ablow’s critique of the J. Crew ad.
(Note that another critic, Erin Brown, over at the conservative Culture and Media Institute, commits fewer fallacies, but only because her article is shorter. But then she apparently doen’t even know what J. Crew is, referring to the men’s and women’s clothier as a “popular preppy woman’s clothing brand.” I happen to own two J. Crew ties. Men’s ties.)
Now, my response to the critics of J. Crew’s ad may seem flippant. So be it. Sometimes ridicule is the best response to something ridiculous. But there is a serious point to be made, here, about the social responsibility of business.
Ablow and Brown share one important view in common with many critics of modern capitalism, namely this: they all believe that businesses have an obligation to pursue certain social agendas. They merely disagree over what that agenda should be. For Ablow and Brown, the social obligation of business is to defend & promote good ol’-fashioned American values, including apparently carefully scripted gender roles. For critics of capitalism, the social obligation of business is to promote social justice, environmental values, gender equality, and so on. In either case, those who urge businesses to adopt social missions — as opposed to merely making and selling stuff that people want to buy, within the bounds of law and ethics — ought to be careful what they wish for. Because if and when businesses do take up social agendas, they may not be the agendas that those advocates prefer.
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Thanks to Laura for showing me this story.
The Business Ethics Blog 