TrustThere have been at least 20 film versions of “The Invisible Man”. With a few minor variations, the plot is always largely the same: A scientist discovers the secret of invisibility, goes on to commit various crimes and finally becomes murderously insane. Plato’s Republic has perhaps one of the earliest versions of the story. In it, a shepherd called Gyges finds a ring that makes the wearer invisible. Using it, he seduces the queen and then murders and replaces the king. Invisibility stories revolve around the idea that people will be criminal if they can get away with it, or more specifically, that people are naturally ‘criminal’ and only the risk of being caught is what keeps us in check.Fundamentally, according to these stories, people are not to be trusted. We’re told that at the moment, if you trust opinion polls, journalists, and academics, that trust is at an historic all time low. Trust in organisations, institutions, professions and in people is apparently in the final throes of complete erosion. Why is there a crisis in trust? One answer is that there are a lot of big crooks about, and it’s easier than ever to hear about them. Genuinely untrustworthy behaviour by companies like Enron undermines people’s belief in organisations. Or it reaffirms people’s belief in the selfishness of corporations, depending on their initial point of view. Another cultural reason is our relativist, subjectivist, postmodern condition that means that there is a pervasive lack of belief in any institutions. Today, people give trust conditionally, tactically, and always provisionally. Before we go too far, there are important limits to our distrust. We live in the uncertain and decadent haze of late model capitalism, but it is underpinned by a trust in the materiality of commerce. We can pretty much trust that things that we buy will do what they are supposed to do (we are all fairly sophisticated in filtering out marketing over-claims). We trust that the books that we order on Amazon will be delivered in good condition and that we won’t be overcharged for them. Our VAIOs will work. If something goes wrong, it will be sorted out. We mostly trust markets to set prices. We trust in products and the services; we just don’t quite trust the companies that provide them. It’s odd to think that a problem that was once explained with reference to invisibility is now believed to be solved by transparency. Transparency is not the remedy for distrust; it is the palliative response. Transparency, as Onora O’Neill explained out in her 2002 Reith Lectures, does not restore trust, it just allows us to hope that inherently untrustworthy organisations will be compelled to do the right thing for fear of being found out. In that kind of environment, we are even suspicious of the transparency itself. We worry that companies will be selectively transparent, keeping the truth of their untrustworthiness hidden all the same. If the stuff works, in what way don’t we trust companies? Transparency can never be the solution because our lack of trust in companies derives from the fact that we are uncertain about duties we want companies to fulfil. What do we want to trust companies to do? What are the duties of an organisation to the environment? To their employees? To their shareholders? To the health of their customers? To the advancement of knowledge? To science? To history? To culture? To the arts? To their directors? To the media? To the environment? To peace? To the Third World? To their industry? To commerce? To social and racial equality? To winning at all costs? To family values? Every MBA course teaches that the ultimate duty of a company is to enrich its shareholders. Sadly, they don’t agree on the timescale. The Enron scandal can be read as the extreme pursuit of short-term shareholder interests, as can many other breaking corporate scandals. It might not be your or my idea of trust, but companies who think like that can at least be depended upon to behave in certain ways. Arthur Andersen’s determination to serve their partners and clients immediate interests destroyed the company and damaged the accountancy profession. They misunderstood their broader duties. Lack of clarity about the duties of organisations makes it impossible to establish appropriate expectations of them. Differences in expectation will lead to disappointment, and disappointment will undermine trust. What’s the role of branding? Opinions vary widely. There’s a school of brand strategists that brands are basically a force for good because they promote positive liberal human values and encourage entire organisations to live up to them. On the other hand, people who think that branding is basically a smart way to dupe dumb people (as in Naomi Klein’s No Logo) complain that brands over-promise on their duties and responsibilities and that the companies that create them fail to live up to them. In No Logo, it appears that the gap between declared values and actual behaviour is the problem. Other companies that behave as badly but don’t make the same claims aren’t seen as quite so bad. My own view is that branding practice is neither moral nor immoral: it is amoral. Branding is about associating products and services that fulfil certain needs with deeply held cultural values. There are a lot of choices to be made about available cultural values, however, and they are often contradictory. For example, we might believe that human nature is inherently generous or, as in the story of Gyges, that human nature is inherently selfish. It is entirely possible to create a brand that is designed to appeal to the most ruthless and selfish segment of society – one that is predicated on reaffirming the cultural beliefs that go with those values. We might debate the desirability of this, but not the possibility. The 1980s branding of merchant banks is a case in point, as was McKinsey at one stage of its development. It is also entirely possible to create more humanistic and ‘caring’ brands. Politically, brands might be ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ and the fundamental differences cannot be reconciled. It is probably impossible to create either and organisation or a brand that will meet all the expectations of duty that might be placed on it in the future. There is however one important control that is more relevant in the internet age than in any other previous period. Branding, if it is successful at all, increases the general visibility of the company and the brand. It is harder than ever to narrowcast a brand without it becoming more visible and more under scrutiny from people who are marginal to or outside of its target market. This alone will mean that brands and their companies will always be subject to competing interpretations and evaluations of what their duties are and how well they live up to them. If invisibility ushers in the risk of anti-social behaviour, brands work against this not because they offer transparency, but because they increase visibility. Adverts and children are everywhere almost all the time. Children see adverts everywhere. They see adverts and junk e-mail that I would prefer to be shielded from on the Internet. Even if it were possible, ‘protecting’ children from advertising would, just as would shielding them from any other part of culture, only make them less prepared and capable to critically evaluate it when they are finally permitted to experience it. Advertising, along with bad parenting and lack of general nutritional knowledge among adults, may be helping to cause obesity in children. Rather than ban adverts for bad products, it would be better to advertise apples. |