Groupon Does the Right Thing
Filed under: accountability, advertising, decision-making, ethics, marketing, protest |
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On Monday I blogged about the controversy over the Groupon.com ad that played during the Super Bowl, which made light of the plight of the people of Tibet. I suggested the ad was deeply disrespectful, and even played (perhaps unintentionally) on some unfortunate stereotypes. (See Groupon Super Bowl Ad: Unethical.)
Now it seems the company is taking the widespread criticism to heart, and pulling both the Tibet ad and the others in that series. Here’s the story, by Wailin Wong for the LA Times: Groupon pulls controversial ads
Groupon Inc. Chief Executive Andrew Mason said the Chicago-based daily deals provider is pulling all of the Super Bowl ads that had provoked a negative reaction online over the weekend.
“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted,” Mason wrote in a blog post on Thursday, adding: “We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads….”
Now, Groupon (and in particular, CEO Mason) seem genuinely contrite; they appear not to have foreseen the public reaction to their ads. Some might speculate, cynically, that they were actually banking on the controversy and the free publicity it would bring, but I see no evidence of that. Well, better late than never I guess. But even better would be a corporate culture that empowered insiders to say, at some point during the planning & production process, “Hmm, is this really a good idea?”
Death by Pizza Delivery: Domino’s Korea
Filed under: brands, employees, food, international, marketing, pay, pricing, workplace safety |
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During most of the 80’s (starting in 1984), customers of Domino’s Pizza in the U.S. enjoyed the benefits of a catchy promise of speedy delivery: Domino’s promised to deliver your pizza in “30 Minutes Or It’s Free.” The only problem: soon after the slogan was introduced, a rise in deaths due to accidents involving Domino’s drivers was noted. The assumption was that drivers were facing pressure to make good on the promise, and were therefore driving faster, which meant they were more likely to have accidents, some of which were fatal. Lawsuits ensued. Big ones. As a result, the “30 Minute” delivery promise ended back in 1991, in the U.S. But apparently the same can’t be said for Domino’s Korea.
Here’s the story, by blogger Lee Yoo Eun, blogging at Global Voices: South Korea: Backlash After ‘30 Minute’ Pizza Delivery Death
A popular Domino’s Pizza marketing strategy promising pizza delivery within 30 minutes of an order has met with a public backlash in South Korea, following the deaths of several young delivery personnel.
The Young Union, the union For Occupational and Environmental Health (FOEC) and several labor unions held a press conference on 8 February, 2011, in front of Domino’s Pizza’s headquarters in South Korean capital Seoul, pressuring the company to abolish the ‘30 Minute’ delivery system….
Here’s another version of the story, from the Korea Times: Quick delivery jeopardizes drivers.
In often discuss the story of “30 Minutes or It’s Free,” as it played out in the U.S., in my business ethics class. I use the case to illustrate 3 key points:
- A simple business decision can have large and unforeseen consequences, ones that result in a major ethical challenge for a company. In this case, a simple (and frankly brilliant) marketing slogan resulted in Domino’s executives being called killers and the company facing multi-million dollar lawsuits.
- The ethical thing to do is not always obvious. We spend a lot of time chastising companies for bad behaviour, but in at least some cases it is genuinely difficult to know what to do. In the Domino’s case, my students are typically unified in the opinion that something had to be done to reduce the rate of accident-related deaths involving Domino’s drivers, but they’re typically deeply divided on a) how far the company needs to go and b) just what strategy they should adopt.
- Putting an ethical decision into action can be very difficult. Back in the late 80’s, there were several thousand Domino’s pizza franchises in the U.S., and tens of thousands of drivers. Any decision made by Head Office was going to have to be implemented by all those franchisees and acted on by all those drivers. Making that sort of thing happen is anything but straightforward.
As for Domino’s Korea — frankly I’m stunned to find out that the people in charge of the Domino’s brand haven’t done more to make sure that a lesson learned 20 years ago, at great expense, is reflected in their international operations.
Groupon Super Bowl Ad: Unethical
Filed under: advertising, brands, character, consumers, ethics, food, international, marketing, virtue |
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A collective gasp could be heard at one particular moment last night during the Super Bowl. No, I’m not talking about the gasp following Nick Collins’ 37 yard touchdown run in the first quarter. I’m talking about the gasp that issued at the punchline of the now-infamous Groupon.com commercial featuring Timothy Hutton.
You can see the 30-second spot here, on YouTube: Groupon – Tibet
And here’s the entire transcript:
“Mountainous Tibet — one of the most beautiful places in the world. This is Timothy Hutton. The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture is in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com we’re getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15 at Himalayan Restaurant in Chicago.”
Immediately following the commercial’s appearance, Twitter lit up with comments about how “offensive” and “tasteless” the Groupon.com commercial was. Media outlets today have been abuzz with criticism and commentary. The headlines tell the tale. According to NBC Chicago: “Groupon Super Bowl Ad Not a Good Deal”. CNN Money.com‘s headline was “Groupon spends big on controversial (tasteless?) Super Bowl spots”. Time asks: “And the Most Offensive Super Bowl Ad Goes To: Groupon?”
But the ad was more than just tasteless. It was unethical. To recruit — and then trivialize — the plight of the people of Tibet to sell Groupon’s services shows a jaw-dropping level of disrespect. And while we often think of disrespect as a matter of bad manners, showing suitable respect for other humans’ basic needs and interets is a core moral principle.
It’s also worth pointing out that the commercial played, perhaps unintentionally, on the unfortunate fact that, for many westerners, complex Asian societies are often most closely associated with exotic dinner fare. Yes, yes, Tibet is exotic and troubled. But hey, they make a yummy curry!
Who knows just what the fallout will be? There have been predictions that Groupon will lose business over this — it’s been suggested that the company may have found the limit of the notion that “there’s no such thing as bad PR.” And, predictably, there have already been calls for a boycott of Groupon.com. Timothy Hutton (once an Academy Award winner) will likely have to go into the spokesperson’s equivalent of rehab, perhaps by working with a pro-Tibet charity of some sort.
Of course, some will cling to the notion that Groupon.com intended all this — that they knew the ad would be controversial, and were aiming directly at the enormous amount of free media coverage they’re now getting. Maybe that’s true. But it was a helluva gamble to take. And, if it was a gamble, it was a gamble that treated the people of Tibet as just another Asian trinket to be tossed in among the poker chips.
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Addition:
It’s been pointed out to me (by @Changents on Twitter) that Groupon is apparently donating money to the causes featured in its commercials. See: http://savethemoney.groupon.com/. I’m not at all sure that that’s sufficient to overcome the worries discussed above, especially given that the disrespectful commercials is all that most people will see or know about. What do you think?
Authentically Unethical
Filed under: character, ethics, excuses, leadership, values, virtue |
Comments (1) Authenticity is the among the favourite buzzwords of the day. (My pal Andrew Potter’s recent book, The Authenticity Hoax, is a wonderful take-down of the concept.)
There are lots of ways the feel-good word, “authenticity”, can fail us. See, for a start, this blog entry by Deborah Gruenfeld and Lauren Zander, for the Harvard Business Review: Authentic Leadership Can Be Bad Leadership.
…being who you are and saying what you think can be highly problematic if the real you is a jerk. In practice, we’ve observed that placing value on being authentic has become an excuse for bad behavior among executives….
Gruenfeld and Zander’s basic point is that while authenticity (being who you really are) is great in principle, is authenticity the right goal if “who you really are” is a jerk? And in fact, there’s a fine line between being a jerk and being unethical. For starters, although most of us have our moments of rudeness, it is unethical — a serious character flaw — to consistently act like a jerk. Consistently acting rudely demonstrates a lack of respect for other people, and that’s unethical. So aiming for authenticity might not be all it’s cracked up to be, especially when compared to the more obvious aim of being a decent human being.
(See also Andrew’s Authenticity Hoax Blog.)
Critical Thinking in Business Ethics, Part 2: Argument Analysis
Filed under: critical thinking, ethics, sustainability, taxation |
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This is the 2nd in a series of postings on the role of critical thinking in business ethics.
(Coincidentally, a story has been in the news recently about how poorly most US college students do at acquiring critical thinking skills during their post-secondary years. See: Study: Students slog through college, but don’t gain much critical thinking.)
One of the absolutely fundamental skills of critical thinking is argument analysis, or the interpretation of argument structure. And the fundamental elements of argument structure are argument premises and conclusions.
In everyday language, the word “argument” means a heated debate. When 2 people are “having an argument,” they’re disagreeing with each other. But the other meaning of the word “argument,” the one with which critical thinking is especially concerned, is this: an “argument” is a series of statements, in which some of those statements (called “premises”) are offereds as support for or reasons to believe another of the statements (called the “conclusion.”) It takes 2 to tango, but it takes just 1 to put forward an argument.
Understanding the structure of an argument is a very good step towards understanding its strengths and weaknesses. Knowing, for example, that a given argument has 3 distinct premises rather than just 1, is clearly pretty fundamental to looking for its weaknesses: the more premises it has, for example, the more possible points of critique. But more fundamental than that, even, is the idea that we simply gain a better appreciation of someone’s point if we can picture — even in a simplified graphical way — the shape of their argument.
Look, for example, at this argument:
The definition of “sustainability” is unclear. Also, sustainability is just one of many important ethical values. So, we should not judge a business entirely by its sustainability ranking.
We can represent this argument graphically, by means of a diagram, as follows:
The arrows in this diagram represent the author’s intended logical “flow” — they can be read as representing the word “therefore.” This argument has 2 premises, each of which lends at least some support to the conclusion. (The fact that there are 2 arrows indicates that there are 2 separate chains of logic here; each premise gives some reason to believe the conclusion.) At this stage all we are doing is sketching the shape of the argument; we are not yet engaging in a critique. But from a critical perspective, this means that if you find fault with one of the premises, the conclusion is still supported — at least to some extent — by the other.
Next, compare that one to this argument:
A tax on dividends means that corporate profits are taxed twice. And taxing the same money twice is unfair. So, a tax on corporate dividends is unfair.
That argument can be diagrammed as follows:
This argument also has 2 premises. But notice that (as implied by the line joining them, and the single arrow flowing from that line to the argument’s conclusion) these 2 premises are working together. They need each other in order to lend support to the argument’s conclusion. This means that a convincing criticism of either one of those premises robs the argument of all of its force. That’s not to say that the conclusion is false; it’s just to say that this argument can’t support the conclusion, if even one of its premises is in doubt.
Now, those are very very simple arguments, and the style of analysis suggested here is not exactly profound. But the simple act of sketching out the shape of an argument — your own or someone else’s — is useful in making clear just how much support the argument does or doesn’t have, and where its critical weak points may be. And agreeing on that is a crucial part of getting debates over business ethics beyond the foot-stomping stage.
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The diagramming method used here is adapted from Lewis Vaughn and Chris MacDonald, The Power of Critical Thinking, 2nd Canadian Edition, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Ethics & Corporate Taxes
Filed under: corporate citizenship, corporations, ethics, finance, government, profits |
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How much tax do corporations pay? Ask most people and I’m guessing they’ll say “not enough.” But seriously, how many people know what the actual corporate tax rate is? And then complicating things, there are the loopholes, those little tricks o’ the accounting trade that — as “everyone knows” — allows most big companies to pay next to nothing. Right?
For insight into these questions, see this useful piece by David Leonhardt, for the NY Times: The Paradox of Corporate Taxes.
OK, so a few answers. In the US, the federal corporate tax rate is 35%. (For comparison: in Japan it’s just over 40%, in Germany it’s 29.8%, and in Canada it’s 16.5%. In Ireland it’s just 12.5%.) So, on an international scale, the US corporate tax rate is actually fairly high. (For more, see Taxes Around the World.)
What about those loopholes? Sure enough, there are American companies that manage to dodge almost all taxes. The most egregious examples are from the cruise-line industry. As the NYT story points out, Carnival Cruise Lines is a prime example:
Over the last five years, the company has paid total corporate taxes — federal, state, local and foreign — equal to only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits. Thanks to an obscure loophole in the tax code, Carnival can legally avoid most taxes.
That’s an extreme case, but lots of other companies manage to avoid paying anything close to the full 35% too. According to the NYT:
Over the last five years, on the other hand, Boeing paid a total tax rate of just 4.5 percent, …. Southwest Airlines paid 6.3 percent. … Yahoo paid 7 percent; Prudential Financial, 7.6 percent; General Electric, 14.3 percent.
.
What’s more surprising, though, is how much tax corporations pay, in total, on average:
The average total tax rate for the 500 companies [in Standard & Poor’s stock index] over the last five years — again, including federal, state, local and foreign corporate taxes — was 32.8 percent.
So while some corporations pay very little tax, there’s also considerable variation.
From an ethical point of view, is this situation fair? Do corporations, in general, pay enough? Too much?On the face of it, that’s a basic issue of distributive justice: is 35% (or some fraction of that, after deductions) the right share of the overall tax burden for corporations (as opposed to individuals) to bear? That’s obviously a big question.
Fundamentally, corporations are a conduit, facilitating the flow of cash from consumers to employees and investors. To some, this implies a fundamental criticism of current patterns of taxation in the corporate world. Such critics point out that there’s a sense in which the money that flows through corporations is taxed twice: corporate profits are taxed, and then any dividend (i.e., a portion of after-tax profit) that is payed out to shareholders is taxed, too. In principle (as far as I can see) the same could be said about the money paid out to employees in the form of salaries (though the tax on profits is paid on the amount left over after expenses, including salaries, are paid). To the extent that I understand it, this criticism seems odd to me: after all, money flows around (and around and around) the economy, and is taxed at various points along the way (and is then injected back into the economy, of course, in the form of government spending). The point is that we (via government) levy taxes at specific points in this flow, and at specific rates, based on whether we want to encourage or discourage particular behaviours. If you tax a behaviour, then, other things being equal, people will do less of it. And if you offer a tax deduction for y, you are encouraging people to do more of it. We tax at various points in the corporate “process”, if you will, in order to encourage or discourage particular activities like investment. So in a sense, there is no “corporate share” of the tax burden — there’s just the question of whether various taxes and deductions operating in the corporate world broadly understood are effective in achieving our goals. (Although there is a question of justice regarding any difference in the way dividends are taxed as opposed to employment income.)
But again, back to the issue of loopholes as a way of reducing a corporation’s tax burden. Now, it’s worth considering the point of loopholes, from a public policy point of view. In some cases, at least, “loophole” is just the pejorative term for a tax exemption or deduction that a government has put in place to encourage or deter certain kinds of behaviour: deductions for investments in equipment or buildings are an example of this. But you don’t have to be either a tax lawyer or even a keen observer of politics to guess that some such mechanisms are astute ways for government to mould the economy, whereas others are almost certainly boondoggles resulting from savvy corporate lobbying. Then, of course, there’s also the question of gaming the system. A particular incentive (or loophole) might have been put in place for sound public-policy reasons, yet be abused by corporations as a way of dodging taxes (say, by investing in new equipment in order to reap a tax benefit and then selling the equipment off as soon as it can within the letter of the law). The most obvious ethical litmus test here is the “intent-of-the-law” test. It is prima facie unethical to misuse a tax deduction that is intended to be socially beneficial in a manner that is cynically aimed at simply minimizing corporate tax burden.
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p.s., I’m not an accountant or tax lawyer. If anyone with relevant expertise can correct any of the factual assumptions above, please do help out. Thanks.
Sustainability Rankings, the Global 100, and Greenwashing
Filed under: accountability, consultants, ethics, greenwashing, marketing, rankings, sustainability, transparency |
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What’s so sustainable about the Global 100 “World’s Most Sustainable Companies”? Not much, as far as I can see.
The ranking was released just a few days ago, as reported here by Helen Coster for Forbes: Ranking The World’s Most Sustainable Companies
The term “sustainable”–like “green” and “all-natural” before it–conveys an abstract sense of do- gooding that many companies have been happy to adopt. Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based media company, applies hard metrics to the otherwise fuzzy term, and Saturday it released its seventh-annual list of the world’s most sustainable companies….
So, what does sustainability mean, here? Toby Heaps, Corporate Knights’ editor-in-chief, says one key is to ask this question: “how are companies squeezing more wealth from the resources that they use?” So far so good — I suspect that kind of efficiency measure has something to do with what most people take “sustainability” to mean. But next Heaps strays into strange territory when he asks, in addition, “How are they doing a better job of respecting the social contract, like paying taxes or having diverse leadership?” Huh? We’ll get back to the issue of criteria in a moment. First let’s look at the rankings.
The top end of the list is dominated by global brands from the telecommunication, pharmaceutical, and energy industries (Nokia, Johnson & Johnson and Intel are all in the top 5). But an oil company takes top honours (Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil). Yes, an oil company. Now, for many people, the petroleum industry is the epitome of unsustainable business. So this will immediately raise alarms for some people. Should it? Let’s take a closer look.
The Forbes story says that Statoil topped the list “thanks in part to improvements in its water productivity.” Fair enough: water productivity (efficiency of water use) is a clear sustainability issue. But what comes next is odd. The oil company apparently did well in the ranking in part because it is “also a healthy contributor to Norway’s coffers and has a diverse board”. In other words, this oil company scored well on a sustainability ranking by doing a whole bunch of stuff that has little to nothing to do with sustainability.
For still more detail, we can look at the ranking and an explanation of the methodology behind it on the Global 100 website. According to the Methodology page, the ranking is established by looking at “environmental, social, governance (ESG) and financial data.” Already we see here a rather expansive understanding of the word “sustainability.” Next, let’s look at specific measures they used.
Some of the metrics used make perfect sense, such as energy productivity and waste productivity. Some of them, however, are hard to figure, such as CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio. Executive compensation is an interesting (and, I think, complicated) ethical issue, but how does it relate to sustainability? The detailed explanation of the various criteria offers this rationale:
A disproportionate share of compensation expenditure going to one person can lead to lower overall workforce motivation, and can also be indicative of potential governance risks, or misalignments of interests.
All of that seems true, but largely irrelevant. Sure, those risks are real, and they may (may!) have something to do with keeping the company in business. But surely that is not what anyone beyond a handful of consultants means by the word “sustainability.” When the public wonders whether Walmart’s business is “sustainable,” they are certainly not wondering whether the company’s business practices are going to let them keep chugging along.
Another mystifying criterion is “Leadership Diversity: % of women board directors.” Again, that’s an important issue; companies need to do more to get women into senior leadership positions, including on the board. But is there really a clear link — either conceptual or empirical — between having women on the board and the company being sustainable? Unfortunately, while that criterion is mentioned on the Criteria & Weights page, it is missing entirely from the more detailed explanation of those criteria (see PDF document here) so what the link is supposed to be is anyone’s guess.
Other weird criteria include “Safety Productivity”, “% tax paid” and “Innovation Capacity,” though the latter makes at least a modicum of sense. As far as I can see, fully half of the ten criteria used have no clear link to sustainability. And given that all criteria are given equal weight in the Global 100 methodology, that means the ranking is actually only half about sustainability, and half about other stuff.
Now, I’ve been critical of the term “sustainability” before (see “Sustainability is Unustainable.”) A lot of what I’ve said before has to do with confusion over the meaning of the term, and the resulting difficulty in measuring and tracking companies’ performance in this area. I think the Global 100 ranking ends up providing a wonderful case in point.
But the real problem, here, is that the kind of sustainability measure instantiated by the Global 100 profits directly from the confusion over the meaning of the term “sustainability.” (And I do mean “profits” — Corporate Knights is a for-profit organization, as presumably are the research firms that helped develop the Global 100 and the vast majority of sustainability consultants who help companies preen for such rankings.) Now, I don’t actually have anything against profits, and I’m not impugning anyone’s intentions. My point is that the only reason this particular set of measures can be thought to add up to “sustainability” is that the term itself is ambiguous and means different things to different people.
What’s really being measured here is a broad range of indicators having to do with all kinds of things. Again, it includes “environmental, social, governance…and financial data.” And it’s all important stuff. So the Global 100 ranking really does tell us something important (but vague) about the companies listed. But what is announced is that ‘these companies are sustainable.’ What does that mean to the public? Environment. So the list implies that these companies are environmental good guys. The result: greenwash.
So, what’s the public to do? Maybe all the public can do is realize that what sustainability consultants and gurus mean by “sustainability” has relatively little to do with what they mean by that word.
Pepsi Makes the Best of a Super Bowl-Free Sunday
Filed under: advertising, brands, corporate citizenship, CSR, marketing, sponsorship, sports | Tags: philanthropy
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Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. PepsiCo has managed to make a win out of not sponsoring the biggest advertising event of the year.
See the story here, by Jennifer Preston of the NYT: Pepsi Bets on Local Grants, Not the Super Bowl
What’s better than reaching more than 100 million viewers during last year’s Super Bowl? For Pepsi, it could be 6,000 football fans during a high school game on Friday night in central Texas. Or a group of parents who wanted a new playground in their Las Vegas neighborhood.
That is the bet that PepsiCo made when it walked away from spending $20 million on television spots for Pepsi during last year’s Super Bowl and plowed the money into a monthly online contest for people to submit their ideas and compete for votes to win grants….
This is the first time in 23 years that Pepsi isn’t a sponsor of the Super Bowl. How did this happen? Who knows. Maybe the price-tag got too rich for them. Maybe they got outbid. (Though it’s worth noting that PepsiCo won’t be entirely absent from the Super Bowl: the game will feature ads for two of the company’s other brands, Pepsi Max and Doritos.) At any rate, Pepsi says it’s just a new strategy. Interestingly, they say — despite the fact that this new strategy involves giving millions of dollars to good causes — it’s not a philanthropic strategy:
“This was not a corporate philanthropy effort,” said Shiv Singh, head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages America. “This was using brand dollars with the belief that when you use these brand dollars to have consumers share ideas to change the world, the consumers will win, the brand will win, and the community will win.
It’s an interesting move. For one thing, it brings together cause-based marketing and social media on a supersized scale. And to me, whatever the motivation for the move, it’s a true-and-justified instance of corporate social responsibility. It’s not ethically obligatory: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing things the old way. It’s not unethical to spend $20 million-plus on commercials for the Super Bowl, like they did last year. And it’s not obligatory to support dozens or hundreds of local causes. So think of it this way: PepsiCo has $20 million to spend on building its brand. It had to choose a strategy, a choice regarding how to spend that money. They could give it to the NFL, or they could give it to a bunch of worthy charities. If they can achieve their objectives (and hence fulfill obligations to shareholders) while at the same time doing some social good, that’s a good example of CSR.
As the company says, though, it’s a gamble. But as gambles go, they’re sure making the best of it. PepsiCo is turning not sponsoring the Super Bowl into a straight-up victory, rather than a defeat. And notice also that, with the right media coverage, Pepsi still gets its name associated with the Super Bowl.
God-Washing Davos
Filed under: ethics, finance, greenwashing, international, sports, Uncategorized, values, workplace safety |
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Can religion save the soul of the world’s economic system? What does religion have to do with ethics? In particular, what does religion have to do with business ethics? There’s certainly no necessary connection. You’ll notice an utter lack of theological arguments in this blog, for instance. But many people see a connection, and perhaps a necessary one.
For example, see this piece by Dan Gilgoff, for CNN’s “Belief” Blog: How Davos found God
…Since the banking crisis shook global markets more than two years ago and contributed to a worldwide economic slump, the annual Davos summit has invited dozens of religious and spiritual leaders to hash out issues like business ethics and the morality of markets in the company of presidents and corporate titans….
This worries me for two reasons.
First is that religious leaders have no particular expertise in the questions at hand. One clergyman quoted in the story says the key question is “how do you embed values in the culture of companies in a way that would change behaviors?” Good question, but it’s not one about which most religious leaders are likely to have any real insight. Most, for example, won’t know much about the workings of corporations, or about corporate culture, or about (for example) what the criminological literature says about the real causes of wrongdoing. Sure, talking about values can be a good thing. But there’s no good evidence that religious values, or organized religion as a way of inculcating values, does anything in particular to make people more ethical. And certainly there’s no reason to believe that “40 minutes of guided meditation” is going to play any role at all in fixing the problems faced by the world’s economy.
My second worry is that the inclusion of religious leaders is a distraction, a way of deflecting criticism by including a few dozen people who a large portion of the public are likely to associate with the idea of being a good person. It’s symbolic. It’s a way of signalling to the public that the business world really is concerned about doing the right thing — without engaging anyone who actually has the relevant expertise. It’s a feel-good move. It’s like greenwashing, but with religion rather than environmentalism as the focal distraction.
“Attacking a brand is like attacking a person”
Filed under: brands, consumers, corporations, definitions, food, honesty, labelling, personhood |
Comments (1) Last week on my Food Ethics Blog, I posed the following question: Fast Food Beef: What Matters? At the heart of that blog posting is a lawsuit that has been filed against Taco Bell, alleging that…
…Taco Bell’s “meat mixture”, which it dubs “seasoned beef” contained less than 35 % beef. If these figures are correct, the product would fail to meet minimum requirements, set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to be labeled as “beef”. The other 65% of the “meat” is made up of water, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, silicon dioxide, anti-dusting agent and modified corn starch
Today comes news that Taco Bell is fighting back. See this story from ABC News: Taco Bell Fights ‘Where’s the Beef’ Lawsuit
According to the ABC story, Taco Bell President Greg Creed says the allegations are simply false.
Well, sorting that out shouldn’t be too hard, for some unbiased food scientists.
More interesting is Creed’s moralized counter-attack:
“Attacking a brand is like attacking a person. It’s just unacceptable when there aren’t any facts to support it….”
Attacking a brand is like attacking a person? How so? Creed doesn’t expand on the question, but he make just mean that attacking a brand is “like” attacking a person in that both are wrong when they involve falsehoods — perhaps simply because lying is generally wrong.
But setting aside that line of argument, is it possible that a stronger thesis is justified, namely that a brand is something that deserves protection the way that a person deserves protection? Now, I’ve argued before that corporations need to be considered persons. And I’ve also blogged about whether corporations should have the right to sue for libel to protect their interests. But a brand isn’t the same as a corporation, so the arguments I’ve given about those don’t quite hold, here.
The most obvious way to think of the ethical justification (or requirement?) for defending a brand against attack is to think of the brand as a piece of property. If you damage the brand, you damage the interests of those who own it. Sometimes that will be justified (perhaps because the good done by damaging the brand outweighs the interests and/or rights of the brand’s owners), and sometimes it won’t. But I wonder if a still-stronger thesis is possible: is there any reasonable sense in which the brand could be thought of as an entity in its own right, with interests separable from those of its owners? Consider the world’s most valuable brand, Coca Cola. If all of the owners of stock in Coca Cola repudiated their ownership rights, and if all the employees of the company all quit en masse (eliminating another key stakeholder), what would we say about the Coca Cola brand? It would no longer, per hypothesis, have any “owners.” Would it cease to have any ethical significance at all? Would there be nothing either right or wrong that you could do “to” it? What about other brands, like the Red Cross or Greenpeace?
I don’t have good answers, but I think it’s an intriguing question, given the significance of brands in the early 21st century.
The Business Ethics Blog 