Ethics and Branding

Advertising veteran Martin Lindstrom, who authored Buyology and has written extensively on branding, recently published something of a manifesto on branding and ethics for Fast Company. It’s a good piece: short, provocative, and worth reading.

In it, Lindstrom refers to himself as a “brand futurist” whose job in part is “to predict the future.” And indeed, if his word is to be trusted, he’s made some accurate predictions in the past – for example, envisioning a Facebook-like experience before Facebook came into being. (This was, notably, right around the time that MySpace appeared.)

Looking forward into the rest of 2012 and beyond, Lindstrom makes this bold statement:

“My prediction for 2012 is a rise in the importance of ethics. I foresee a kind of WikiLeaks emerging to tackle the maneuvrings of less-ethical brands. The move will come from an independent organization with the sole mission of disclosing what those companies are up to. Most companies will be vulnerable to being targeted, despite having some sort of written standards.”

I agree with Lindstrom on the growing importance of ethics in business, but I suggest that his “prediction” has in fact already come true. Consider, for example, the Susan G. Komen decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood, or Apple’s now well-documented supply chain problems. In both cases, ethical concerns over business practices led to wide-spread publicity and, ultimately, a response by both organizations to address public outcry. In Komen’s case, the public outrage was especially swift and damaging.

But what these two situations reveal, however, is not the existence of a kind of WikiLeaks-like organization uncovering questionable ethics, but rather the ability of the general public to use the Internet – and especially social media – to bring companies to task for their missteps. In this day and age, companies must take the utmost case in their business practices and decisions and, as Lindstrom suggests, make every effort to be open, honest, transparent, and ethically sound.

And yet, is that standard achievable in the world of business?