Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics

Patrick Byers’ Responsible Marketing blog quite correctly calls attention to Pfizer’s Lipitor ads featuring artificial heart inventor Robert Jarvik–only, it turns out, in the ads featuring “Jarvik” rowing or doing other highly physical activities, it’s a professional athlete, a body double.

There are times you could make a case that using an endorser’s double is legitimate–but not, IMHO, when you’re advertising a product for the greater physical endurance it supposedly provides, having an internationally known cardiologist endorsing it, and you replace a man who is “about as much an outdoorsman as Woody Allen. He can’t row” with an undisclosed professional athlete.

Byers implies that this is not ethical–and I agree with his assessment.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with a very smart-sounding marketing copywriter. It was all about trust, integrity–the stuff I talk about in this blog, in my award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and in my ethics newsletter.

Thinking that this was someone I needed to know, and thinking about all sorts of mutual-benefit ventures we could do, I went to the writer’s site.

And boy, was I shocked!

It was a hard-sell, blowhard, I-know-so-much-more-than-you snow job, and the only credibility builder was the very generous use of testimonials. Let’s just say I did NOT feel ready to trust him.

Well, guess who I *won’t* be approaching with any partnership offers. We’ll never know what might have been, because he led me in expecting one sort of thing, and delivered something entirely different.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

Thoughtful article by Mallen Baker in the UK publication Ethical Corporation, discussing a number of specific companies who’ve been called on the carpet for greenwashing: claiming to be more ecological than they really are.

As one among many examples:

Shell, which said “we use our waste CO2 to grow flowers”, was in breach of the advertising code because the wording could be seen to imply that all the company’s waste CO2 was so used, not just 0.33 per cent of it.

The result of this corporate misfeasance is not surprising. As Baker notes,

According to a recent survey, 80 per cent of Britons now think that companies simply pretend to be ethical in order to sell more products. Widespread cynicism over all the claims has set in, and is hardening with every ill-judged poster or TV ad. Nobody can see an ad with flower petals floating from the exhaust of a motor car and be anything other than cynical.

Oil companies are often making green claims, which I’ve learned to treat with skepticism. Yet I admit to being fooled occasionally. I once profiled BP as the socially responsible company of the month in my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter on the basis of its stated policies and actions on environmental responsibility. Later, I found out that BP still has quite its share of environmental problems, even disasters.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, media-general

Is it outright deliberate deception, bad science, or merely urban legend run amok?

The widely cited study that claims the manufacturing and transport of Prius batteries has worse environmental impact than building and driving a Hummer has serious flaws:

  • It bases assumptions on the Hummer being driven for 379,000 miles, while the Prius gets retired after just 109,000 miles (and having owned many Toyotas, I can tell you that most of them are just hitting their stride at 100K); this alone is enough to completely invalidate the study
  • The issues about nickel mining are taken out of context and based on 30-years-obsolete data
  • In general, life-cycle issues related to cars skew 85% toward use over the vehicle’s lifetime, and only 15% to manufacturing and distribution–so even if the Prius energy consumption has a higher front-load than typical, it’s not likely to be enough to overwhelm the energy savings during the car’s useful life
  • Oh yes, and no independent researchers reviewed the data

    • Two good articles with real data: This very readable one from the Sierra Club, and this more technical one from Pacific Institute (it’s a PDF).

    I would be very curious about what economic interests were behind the original claim–which got picked up by George Will, among many others.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary

    Chris MacDonald’s Business Ethics Blog has a very amusing article on the Mafia’s Code of Ethics, in which he extracts business success principles from the until-recently-secretMafia’s 10 Commandments.

    As one example:

    #3. Never be seen with cops.” (i.e., avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest)

    Chris doesn’t do permalinks on his blog, so to find this post, dated 11/11/07, use the search bar to hunt for ” Business Ethics, Mafia Style”.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Publishing

    It’s bad enough that sploggers go around lifting articles and slapping them up on splogs (spam blogs) with no paragraph breaks and a bunch of Google ads.

    Now, Business Week reports on professor Philip M. Parker, “author” of 300,000 scraped books.

    I am sorry, but setting a computer robot to pull data from a topic is not authorship. While as a multi-source compilation it probably doesn’t qualify legally as theft, it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth! Some of “his” reports sell for as much as $495, too.

    Yuck!

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Politics

    My guest blog today is on whether the Code of Ethics, and self-regulation among bloggers generally, may help keep regulators out of blogs.

    Also, my previous posts on that blog have attracted comments. In my response to one of yesterday’s comments, I brought up the strange saga of the insults hurled at members of the U.S. championship women’s bridge team, who have been accused by other bridge players of treason and sedition for holding a sign at the awards ceremony in Shanghai, declaring that they did not vote for Bush.

    Well, it may not be to the liking of some conservative bridge players, but it’s a long way from the definition of treason or sedition. One could actually make more of a case that bush and some of his cronies have committed treason.

    Last time I checked, it as enshrined in the Constitution (specifically the First Amendment) that Americans have a right to free speech. Whether or not this was an appropriate forum could be discussed (especially in the context of the self-regulation versus outside regulation question I raised on the IAOC blog), but the right not to be silenced is guaranteed, at least in theory.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Social and Economic Justice

    Bunch of interesting stuff in the latest issue of the British publication Ethical Corporation, all available online.

    Among the goodies:

    A rather jaundiced view of Apple’s treatment of its customers and the Steve Jobs mystique–also referred to as the “reality distortion field”

    A look at diamond mining giant DeBeers and its partnership with Botswana. This is a company much-criticized by activists over the years. Who knew they even had a corporate citizenship department or a board member from the Botswanan government? I’m not ready to award them a Positive Power Spotlight any time soon but I’m glad to see they’re not completely evil.

    An examination of Starbucks’ relationships with its workers amid charges that the company that prides itself publicly on social responsibility is in some ways a less union-friendly climate. On one statistic–percentage o employees covered by the corporate health plan–it compares unfavorably with the notorious union buster Wal-Mart.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Politics

    The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed a retired AT&T worker, Mark Klein, who claims he actually observed AT&T diverting copies of pretty much all email–not just the foreign stuff to the National Security Agency.

    In an interview Tuesday, he said the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T. Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

    He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data – the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text – per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government’s warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

    How did it work?

    The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One copy fed into the secret room. The other proceeded to its destination, he said.

    “This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.”

    I urge you to contact your representatives i Congress and the Senate (I’ve written to mine) and tell them NOT to allow any amnesty for telecom companies that illegally turned over data to the government.

    It as a crime when Google and Yahoo helped send a Chinese activist to jail by giving their records to the Chinese government and it’s a crime that AT&T turned over our e-mails to an agency not authorized to see them.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Politics, Publishing

    Most book contracts give the publisher the right to sell at a deep discount to book clubs, and to pay much less to the authors on those sales. However, the assumption is that the book club is a distinct and separate entity.

    For example, if one of my publishers, Chelsea Green, sold my Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World to Book of the Month Club, I’d get lower royalties, reflecting the deep discount.

    But here’s the ethics problem: The New York Times reports on a lawsuit filed by several authors against their publisher, Regnery Publishing–probably the dominant name in books for those with a conservative worldview.

    The authors (Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter) accuse Regnery of essentially forming a book club of its own with the express intent of defrauding authors out of royalties due, by channeling as many sales as possible into its book club and other wholly-owned enterprises.

    In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

    This is a rather nasty form of self-dealing, given the small share authors get even under the best of terms. (Yes, I’m a publisher. I know how much publishers have to invest in a book, yada yada–but I’m also a member of the National Writers Union and I’ve seen the way things are stacked against authors in most book deals.)

    While I totally disagree with these authors’ view of world and national politics, if what they say is true, I totally support their drive to get their fair share. Selling inventory to oneself in order to pay pennies on the dollar is unethical and disgusting.

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