Just when you thought, oh, the well is capped and Tony Hayward’s gone, maybe we can get back to normal—comes this little bit of news, courtesy of my colleague Chris MacDonald, a business ethics guy in Canada:
Just how dumb are these guys?
Editor’s note: I like to say that my blog “covers the intersections of ethics, politics, media, marketing, and sustainability.” But I think this may be the first post in six years of blogging that touches on all five.
Chris Brogan’s blog brought my attention to a Levi’s ad called “Go Forth”—one of the most thought-provoking ads I’ve ever seen.
“A long time ago, things got broken here. People got sad, and left. Maybe the world breaks on purpose—so we can have work to do.” The young girl narrator says this, and a bunch of stuff about the pioneer/frontier spirit.
The ad shows a lot of images of a distressed town, Braddock, Pennsylvania—but also images and especially narration of hope and achievement. The people in the ad are not professional actors, but Braddock residents, apparently.
To, me this ad was about a company wanting to make a difference in a town. Yes, I noticed everyone was wearing Levi’s—but I didn’t pick up a message that I should buy its blue jeans. I got the message that it’s my job to make a difference in the world, no matter what I happen to wear.
Now, I confess—As an entrepreneur motivated more by creating social and environmental change than by making a monetary fortune, I am exactly who this ad is directed at. And I was fascinated. I took the rare step of typing in the link that was displayed on the video to find out more: Levisgoforth.com.
[Side note: In my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I attack the conventional wisdom that you need seven or more touchpoints to create action. I argue instead that if you match message to market exactly, even a single impression may be enough. In this case, I took action immediately, on my first exposure.]
Fully expecting a corporate rah-rah site about how Levi was helping communities, I was rather shocked to find a third-party site about the project, and one that was fairly critical of the company (click on the Go Forth and Facts pages). The site is anonymous, though there is a contact-the-site-creator link, which brings up an e-mail address for someone named Brett. Obviously, this link was added later, and not by Levi’s.
Apparently, Levi’s made a one-time million-dollar investment in the community, which is being put to good use creating artist spaces and the like. The effort has the active support of the mayor, but apparently is somewhat controversial in town. But the site attacks Levi’s for treatment of workers, shipping all its manufacturing jobs overseas, and environmental violations, as well as for trying to make the problems go away with a one-time infusion of cash. It says, “We all want to see Braddock Prosper we just have different solutions” (punctuation and capitalization are from the original).
What’s really odd to me is that this third-party intervention is the only call to action. Why didn’t Levi’s have one of its own? They get me all worked up with a feel-good surge of “I can do something,” and then utterly drop the ball.
If you’ve followed my work, you’ll know I’m not usually a fan of image-only advertising (though I’ve seen it serve some powerful purposes, even on campaigns I’ve been involved with). I believe strongly in having a call to action. That is particularly true when you use such deep emotional hooks as this ad does. Why leave people with no place to go? Why not harness that energy?
I asked my wife, novelist Dina Friedman, to view the ad. Although she teaches in a business school, she’s not an entrepreneur. But like me, she is an activist. Her reaction was quite negative: “They’re trying to tell me that their blue jeans are a way out of poverty. If they want to show corporate responsibility, why not run an ad highlighting what they’re doing for this community.”
View the video. visit the go forth site. And tell me what you think. Please post your comment below.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico shows a number of lessons. Taking them to heart, as individuals, as business people, and as a country, will be crucial. First, four specific lessons from this disaster. Points five and six address our long-term energy future.
1. It is absolutely essential to have tested remedies in place in case of catastrophic failure. BP’s throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach would have been laughable, except that it was sickening. It became clear very early on that the company had absolutely no clue how to contain a large oil rupture. You don’t make those experiments after the failure, but well in advance—before you ever deploy any potentially dangerous and highly disruptive technology—you’d darned well know how you’re going to deal with an emergency. And those solutions will have been tested and demonstrated to work. BP clearly had no clue that working a mile underwater was different than working on the surface, and should never have been allowed to operate.
2. Don’t give the fox the keys to the henhouse. Government oversight was spotty, at best, and that led to a situation where BP was allowed to override the good judgment of its own engineers. Enforce the rules we’ve enacted to protect our people and our planet. BP so obviously neglected its responsibility to public safety and environmental responsibility that I wrote a post back in May wondering whether there was a good case to bring criminal charges agaisnt the oil giant.
3. When you take massive shortcuts with safety, when you cut corners in the name of short-term profit, the financial consequences are often more severe than doing it right in the first place. BP will be spending tens of billions of dollars that it could have easily avoided, by spending a few hundred thousand dollars upfront on safety equipment, and by heeding the warnings of engineers who said before the accident that their path was unacceptably risky.
4. Even redundant safety devices can fail. We saw this with the Titanic, with Three Mile Island, and with Deepwater Horizon. Engineers are not always skilled at anticipating how different systems interact, and what happens to a system downline from a system failure.
And now, at the federal policy level…
5. Deepwater Horizon is a wake-up call to move away from centralized, polluting energy technologies. The risk of gathering so much energy in one place is significant, and when catastrophes happen, they happen BIG. There are a dozen reasons why oil (and fossil fuels generally) cannot be the long-term answer. And there are a dozen reasons why nuclear should never have been deployed in the first place, of which catastrophic accident is certainly one. A major nuclear accident would make Deepwater Horizon seem like a leaky neighborhood sewer pipe. There are still parts of the Ukraine left uninhabitable by Chernobyl, 24 years ago—and even that was not as severe as the worst-case accident. We MUST change our economy over to non-polluting, renewable, decentralized technologies such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, geothermal, and of course, conservation/deep-energy-efficiency retrofits.
6. This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. All deep-sea offshore drilling needs to be shut down until the appropriate safety measures are in place so that Deepwater Horizon is not repeated. It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than to keep it in to begin with.
Long-time environmental activist and Green consultant’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.
This post is part of today’s worldwide BloggersUnite event, Empowering People With Disabilities.
As my Boomer generation ages, and as our parents move well into the elder category, I reflect often on something I learned as a young organizer with the Gray Panthers (1979-80): the idea that society had best learn how to incorporate people with disabilities into active daily life, because most of us were going to grow into that category sooner or later. Accidents, injuries, degenerative diseases, and the general aging process mean that most of us can’t physically do some of what we used to do.
But it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t be useful and productive. Role models are all around us. My Gray Panther chapter leader was a woman in her 70s who could barely see or hear and had some walking disabilities. She could still give fiery speeches once I brought her to the senior center we’d be speaking at that day–and at age 70, she’d taken up yoga and become a vegetarian.
In fact, long before there was consciousness about disability rights, I was raised reading about some of the intellectual and artistic superstars with disabilities. Helen Keller is the most famous, a widely respected author, speaker, and thinker who could neither see nor hear. Also, the inventor and scientist Charles Steinmetz and President Franklin Roosevelt, among others. Grandma Moses, one of America’s most famous painters, never picked up a brush until age 76–and that left a 25-year career as an artist before her death at 101.In our own era, physicist Stephen Hawking comes to mind.
Now, with disability activism and a much greater visibility following the 1988 Americans with Disabilities Act, we see over and over again the talent and resources we had lost by shutting people with disabilities away and out of the mainstream. We’re a long way from full equality, but we’ve sure made progress.
Yankee Candle’s world headquarters is a few miles up the road from me. Today’s paper had a short article about recruiting people to dance in one of their commercials, to be filmed in the flagship store, in an attempt to go viral and be shared around thousands of times on YouTube.
The company is modeling the attempt after the very popular series of videos of performances appearing to erupt spontaneously in public places, such as the massive dance rendition of Do Re Me in the Antwerp, Belgium central train station, which has accumulated 18,245,307 views since March 2009 (an average of 1,140,332 views per month).
But I think the company fails to grasp something important: you can’t force social media, and it’s very hard to deliberately get a commercial to go viral. The ones that do, like Honda’s “The Cog” video, are innately interesting and only secondarily promoting a product or brand.
Interestingly, even that famous example has only had 759,774 views, 11 months after it was posted. I’d have expected several million at least. This was a commercial that must have cost a fortune to engineer and set up, and who knows how many takes to get everything in the two-minute sequence working perfectly. Yet only an average of 69,070 people are seeing it in a typical month. When you consider that several million probably watched it as it aired on TV, that’s rather pathetic, ultimately.
Of course, I haven’t seen Yankee Candle’s commercial yet; it’s still being filmed. But I doubt it will have anything like the power of the Antwerp dance.
The Senate can’t pass a jobs bill or a carbon cap bill, but had no trouble finding $60 billion for war.
All I can say to the Senate is, shame on you people! You’ve got your priorities all wrong.
And I can also say to Progressives that we need to reclaim the discourse in this country. If we don’t create pressure for change, we get the same old same old, even from the administration that was elected on a platform of change. Let’s get out there and make some noise.
Right-wing bloviators spewing bile and calling it “news” have been a fixture on the political scene for quite a few years now. And they’ve had influence far beyond the numbers of “true believers.”
While it’s hard to understand why anyone would pay attention to these mouthy masters of misrepresentation (take that, Spiro Agnew!), we see their influence in the raucous but marginal Tea Party gatherings, in the intransigence of the “Party of NO” in moving any policy agenda forward, and in such incidents as the forcing out of the amazing Van Jones as Obama’s Green Jobs advisor and the defunding of a national community organizing group based on the actions of a couple of idiots (even though most of those approached in the sting refused to go along)–by that logic, we could have defunded Congress centuries ago.
So it’s with gladness that I report that as soon as it became obvious that the widely circulated video of black official Shirley Sherrod making what sounded out of context to be racist remarks–and which forced her unwilling resignation–turned out to be just the opposite–a story of how she overcame her internal racism and did the right thing to help a white family–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made a public apology and offered her a job again.
The hatemongers lose this round. Now…how aobut revisiting the Van Jones incident.
My friend Ken McArthur blogged about his internal struggle in not confronting racist remarks from his substitute barber. I gave him this advice:
It’s not too late. Go back and find him. Tell him, in a respectful, not angry way, “Ever since you cut my hair, I’ve been thinking about some of the things you said and how much I disagree with them. I’ve been beating myself up for not challenging your racism when you expressed it. So today, I’m going to stop beating myself up and tell you that I didn’t appreciate your put downs of those who look different from you, and I’ll not have you cut my hair again.” Then stand still and listen for dialogue. It may be quite vitriolic, but you may be able to go deeper. And you owe him that much.
You do this, not for his soul, but for yours. But there may be a side benefit of reaching his, too (maybe not right away).
Thanks for being brave enough to share this post. I look forward to the follow-up post about what happened when you went back. And how lucky you are that you have the opportunity to “undo the not doing.” I can remember a couple of incidents in my teens where I failed to interrupt racism or sexism on the street and never knew the identities, never had the chance to back and make it right. 40 years later, I still feel guilty.
Mind you, I’m no saint. I have successfully confronted oppressive behavior at times, left it unchallenged at times, and confronted the behavior without effecting any change at other times. Once I got an obscenity-laced tirade directed at me by name and religion, and that was scary (she later called up to apologize). But I’ll always be proud of the time I intervened with a child whose mother was about to lose it over his tantrum in the supermarket (I got the kid laughing by quacking at him)–and always be ashamed that I did nothing to intervene years earlier when a man was verbally abusing his girlfriend on the streets of New York.
By Alexis Bonari
[Editor’s note: Yes, this is fairly elementary—but it’s nice to be reminded of the basics once in a while. If this topic interests you and you want more depth, I recommend Stephen M.R. Covey’s Speed of Trust as well as my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).
—Shel Horowitz]
In our ultra-competitive business world, it is easy to excuse treading on the wrong side of the line that separates necessary competition from sleazy behavior. The younger generation—those in their teens and twenties—have been bombarded with the idea that honor and ethics are relative terms. In other words, if everyone else appears to be cheating the system, it’s “ok” for me to do the same.
Do ethical people get left in the dust?
So, what really happens to businessmen and women who try to play by the rules of good business ethics? Do they get pushed aside by their more competitive, meaner contemporaries? The answer would appear to be “no”.
There’s a reason for everything.
Everything has a source, an origin. Even if we believe that ethics are relative, they still must come from somewhere. Our modern business ethics are founded on philosophical principals that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Humankind has continually refined these rules of conduct so that people can interact with each other in a positive, non-violent manner. Therefore, there is a practical, utilitarian purpose behind agreeing to a code of ethics.
It’s all about trust.
Essentially, we work together best when we feel that we can trust each other. Doing business is the ultimate form of working together. If an individual has questionable dealings in their past, it is highly likely that they will suffer some sort of backlash for it, be that publicly or privately. Take the executives at Enron as an example. They employed very aggressive, hyper-competitive strategies for amassing wealth. When investors felt they could be trusted, they were given huge sums of money. As their underhanded dealings came to light, they became the poster-children for unethical business practices and were reviled by a nation.
Although unethical business practices might result in short-term success, this rarely translates into stable business relationships in the long run. In this sense, those who choose to take a strong ethical stance generally come out ahead in the end.
Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching various online college degree programs. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:
1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.
2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.
3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.
A very good news day, all in all.
Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.