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Romanian chocolate bar raises American flag and ethical questions.

December 31, 2011 By 2 Comments

Raising a flag, raising sales, and raising ethical marketing questions.A marketing campaign raising ethical questions? Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Marketing has a long history of pushing the limits of our comfort zones, and that’s great in many cases. It’s good to shake up assumptions and make us reevaluate limitations or boundaries we may have long accepted. Apple did this repeatedly, starting with their iconic 1984 ad, and then afterward with such gems as Think Different and most recently their iPad2 ads. Many others have done it as well, often in support of some very good causes.

But do ad campaigns cross a line when they use our patriotic passions to encourage us to buy their brand? It’s an old marketing concept, and we’ve seen it in everything from selling cars in the United States to beer in Canada and even Vegemite in Australia. However, a campaign from Romania in 2011 had something different about it. Consumers were “tricked” into thinking that the company would from now on replace the Romanian flag on the bar’s wrapper with an American flag. When the new packaging suddenly appeared, people started to protest, not knowing that their protests were exactly what the campaign was designed to arouse. People were soon demanding the original bar’s wrapping back, not knowing that this was exactly what they were “supposed” to do, as this video shows: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Advertising, Ethics, Marketing strategy, YouTube Tagged With: , , , ,

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays?

December 13, 2011 By 3 Comments

'christmas tree in marunouchi' photo (c) 2006, w00kie - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Tis the season. You know… that season. You know, the one where, well, um, we have a… holiday tree and sing holiday carols. So Merry…

Holidays!

The word “Christmas” has made it to the naughty list in many people’s politically correct (PC) guidelines. Of course, there are certainly still many others who stand firmly by their right to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. And as always, there are a lot of people in that wide area in the middle, not sure whether they’re supposed to say the C word or not. The whether outside is frightful.

So, in 2010, as the big day approached, I asked the following question of my LinkedIn contacts:

It’s Christmas time. Or should I say the Holidays?

Do you make it a point to be or to avoid being politically correct when celebrating religious holidays?

I received 58 answers, with some interesting comments on both sides of the debate. I thought I’d share some of the ones that I thought were particularly well stated, regardless of which side they favored. I’ll admit to making no effort here to keep the numbers even one way or the other; if I thought, “Nicely said!” as I read a reply, that reply ended up here. And since I did not have the writers’ permissions to use their names here, I did not. However, you can certainly read all the comments on the original LinkedIn discussion.

What did they say? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ethics, LinkedIn, Public relations, Small business Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Reference Letter of Death

May 14, 2011 By 2 Comments

It was over a decade ago, but the memory is still fresh and clear. It was the dilemma every employer dreads. A star employee was standing before me, telling me he was applying for another job. Yes, he loved things here, but the new position offered great new opportunities in a faraway location, new responsibilities and skills to be mastered, and on top of it all, a lot more money.

We had a great relationship, so he wanted me to know everything up front, so that I would be inconvenienced as little as possible should he get the new position. Good man. But now I needed to be one too. Not only should I take the high road and wish him luck, he wanted me to write a reference letter to help him get the job.

So here I was. Should I take that nobler path and help this hard-working and deserving young man get ahead in life, or should I try to hang on to a rare find of an employee? I knew what was right. I knew what to do.

Here’s my letter (and yes, names have indeed been changed)… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ethics, Public relations

You can help women entrepreneurs change the world

March 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

fite helps you help women entrepreneurs around the world.The focus of PikeSPeak is generally to pass along something that can help you make the most of your communications, whether online or “in the real world.” This time though, especially in light of today being the 100th International Women’s Day, I’d like to look at an online way you can help others make the most of their real world.

We all feel like we’re having a bad day sometimes. Most times though, our worst days would be a dream come true for the women in developing countries. They know what a bad day is really like. And worst of all, even though many of them work hard to improve their lives, they get little or no support. Women are generally much more likely to be denied a bank loan or be discriminated against. Over 70% of people living below the poverty line are women.

There is now good news for many of these women. Kiva.org has just launched Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship (FITE), an online resource to help women entrepreneurs get small loans to help start or grow a business. Kiva.org is the world’s leading microfinance network, giving people like you and me a way to review and directly support a small business in a developing country. By lending small amounts like $20 or $50 to an entrepreneur in some faraway land, [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ethics Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

You are your own company. How’s that working for you?

February 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

'Walt Disney shows Disneyland plans to Orange County officials, Dec. 1954' photo (c) 2009, Orange County Archives - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Whether you’ve ever thought of it or not, you’re a company. You compete to get people to choose you instead of someone else for almost everything in your life. Getting picked for the team. Dating. Scholarships. Jobs. Raises. Loan or mortgage approvals. Being a part of your teenaged children’s lives. Getting into an exclusive retirement home. How well you market yourself against your competitors will play a huge role in determining whether you win or lose in many areas of your life.

That can sound crass, and in fact it often is. But again, it’s part of being a business. Some companies choose to compete by genuinely caring for their clients and supporting their communities, while others compete aggressively with a “take no prisoners” bravado. You’ll need to determine which is ultimately the most satisfying and rewarding strategy for your life. I’m certainly confident I know which works best in mine.

Whichever you decide, like any company you will need to invest in the things that will improve your value, and you will get ahead by supplying others with what they need. You will nurture your assets – health, family, friends, finances, business relationships, reputation — and take care of them as best you can. You will produce goods or services — your time on the job, your volunteer activities, your relationships in and out of the workplace — and you will move ahead or fall back based upon how good your goods are seen to be. And like any company, you will succeed or fail based largely on the quality of your strategies and tactics in all these various areas.

Yet, amazingly, most of us never take the time to really develop or even consider a business plan or marketing strategy for our lives, or even recognize that we need one. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ethics, General, Self-improvement Tagged With: , , , ,

The Dark Side of Public Relations

October 29, 2010 By 2 Comments

Public relations is suffering from bad PR. The industry is seen as the corporate vehicle for hiding the truth, and somehow wringing good news from bad. Have an oil spill? Did a patient die on the operating table? Did the chairman have an affair with an assistant? No problem… call in the PR team. It has created a sad situation, and we all suffer the consequences.

Actually, it’s not hard to see how we got here.

Restoring PR as a business function

It’s only natural that companies would call in their best communicators when faced with a crisis. But it is both politically and financially unwise to reserve the PR function for crises. Public relations should always be actively involved in corporate planning, able to contribute to the directions being set, rather than just figuring out how to put the best spin on the decisions once they’ve been made. If companies had sound advice on communications for every decision, at least two significant benefits would result:

  • PR would no longer be seen only as a vehicle for disguising bad news, and all corporate communications would gain more credibility; and
  • Companies would be able to anticipate potential public-relations problems before directions are set and decisions made.

The greatest tragedy is that not only the general public, but many decision-makers and even PR teams themselves, have come to see public relations primarily as a resource for crisis communications. The best way to change that is to make sure the team is at the table whenever policy is being set, not just when there’s bad news to wrap.

Remember honesty?

On an even deeper level though, there is another trend that needs to be reversed. Unfortunately, it seems to be increasingly more natural for businesspeople to lie when it’s expedient to do so. Companies and leaders — and hey, all of us — have to get back to believing that it is never okay to lie. From a credibility, integrity, and yes often even a financial point of view, the bottom line is better served by the truth rather than a lie. Consider Watergate, the Canadian military’s Somolia crisis, Clinton and Lewinsky, and many, many, many other situations. How much better would the leaders have emerged if they had insisted on honesty from the very beginning? Even after the initial serious mistakes had been made, the situations could still have been kept from spiraling out of control if more integrity had been shown in facing the truth.

Imagine if the leaders in those situations had had the courage to stand up early and say, “I have made a serious mistake, and I want to set things right. I will not hide or disguise the truth in any way, and I will not tolerate it from anyone else.” It might have turned those crises into opportunities to show character, and start building for a better tomorrow. It didn’t happen, but it could have.

And from a credibility, integrity, and financial point of view, it should have.

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