How do we make our way through the moral maze of marketing? What is
our industry’s moral bottom line, and to whom is marketing accountable?
How important is our behaviour on marketing?
The language of money seems too narrow, as a basis for judging the worth
of ourselves, and the companies for whom we work. But where and how do
we learn the lessons, and live the values that set us, and our brands,
apart?
Power is becoming powerless. No one will be able to use power in the
future in the way that they did in the past.
In an open and transparent world, where many products and services are
at parity, consumer choices will increasingly be made on the basis of
their assessment of a company’s value system. But how does a company
develop such a system?
Perhaps a sense of corporate morality or ethics starts with the
individuals who make up the company. But where and how do they learn a
moral code?
Where does one pick up the genetic fingerprint of a civilised
society?
How do we gain the knowledge that provides answers to daily choices? Is
it taught?
We learn to read and write to gain base-level entry into the food-chain
of employment. But who teaches us about life’s most critical skill, that
of judgment? What pointers are we given to be able to assess in real
life - in the cut and thrust of business - what is good, and what is
bad? Because surely if we don’t make conscious choices, logically half
the time we could be wrong. Perhaps it is time we had a GCSE in
Ethics.
As a marketing man I believe that a company has an image. That it has a
personality. That it can be imbued with attributes beyond framed phrases
on the wall, or logos over the door.
But, surely, even a company’s real image is simply a reflection, a
collection of a set of views that forms a sum of the people that make up
the enterprise.
A tribe is a tribe because it has a common cause, and a common set of
beliefs; a common value system. The question is how one might develop
such a common value system, even in situations when it is something one
has never been taught. Maybe it would be wise to screen for values and
ethics at the interview selection stage to see how they might fit into a
company’s value system.
But how can an employee or customer check the company’s value system -
that is its belief in what it says it is in business to do, and how it
applies its beliefs. Perhaps by trying to ascertain whether the chief
executive or employees are personal consumers or users of the product or
service of the organisation.
Clearly, blind loyalty to a company would not pass the test. But if the
employees of a bank would not save with that bank, because its rates are
not competitive, or if workers in a car plant would not buy the cars
they make, because they are poor value, why would anyone else want to be
customers of those companies?
I suspect that knowledge of a company’s employees, and of their
purchasing behaviour when it comes to buying their own company’s
products or services, would be the most telling judgment of all.
Raoul Pinnell is global head of brands and communications at Shell
International and a Fellow of The Marketing Society.
