Morality, ethics and personal branding
Ethics and personal branding gave me a dilemma in October 2010. I wanted to help entrepreneurs sell more but found a proposal could be understood very differently by businesspeople and consumers.
Ethics and personal branding when facing criticism
I started from my idea of selling a longer return period as an extra service. Some businesspeople thought it was a good opportunity.
Others reacted very critically. I was upset when criticism targeted my honesty, but also said I could see the consumer’s perspective.
Who actually saw the value?
I’d argued myself that reassurance could be something customers wanted to pay for. At the same time, I needed to ask whether customers and businesses saw the same value in the offer.
I described my target audience as entrepreneurs and businesspeople. Helping them mattered to me, but the reactions showed my ideas were also being read outside that group.
I didn’t have a finished solution
I wanted to stand behind what I did while also finding business opportunities. I hadn’t sorted all my thoughts out and invited comments.
That’s my reflection from 2010. The forceful comparisons and statements in the video are my rhetoric from that time, not documented accounts of others’ motives or a justification for every sales method.
Also read about letting your personal brand rest on your own values.
A credible brand and a whole person
This thought again comes from a conversation with a really sharp person. We discussed personal branding and got onto morality and ethics: What’s acceptable?
We agreed good morals are incredibly important. An untrustworthy brand isn’t a strong brand. But for me, it’s also about being a whole person who can close their eyes at night with a clear conscience. Being a genuinely decent person is a major quality, perhaps almost the greatest. Also read Skab din egen succes on finding your own way and holding on to what you stand for.
My dilemma arises because my target audience is entrepreneurs. They’re the people I work with and try to create value for. One way to enrich their lives is helping them sell more products.
We highlight the good things about our products
My view in the video is that PR, marketing and sales include some manipulation, exaggeration and persuasive techniques. I’m sure some will disagree.
I think many entrepreneurs recognise finding every positive aspect of their product and playing down what might not be so good. Otherwise, getting a press release accepted or writing a proper sales letter becomes difficult. I’m not saying exceptions never exist, but I think selling often involves techniques that make people buy.
You can take that discussion right down to a newsletter. Why send it? To whet people’s appetites. Perhaps you try to awaken a need they didn’t have and make them buy something they don’t necessarily need. So where’s the line?
The same idea brought enthusiasm on Amino and anger on EPN
The specific example was my advice for an online shop to earn extra by offering six months of returns instead of the 14 days I used as a starting point in 2010. I mentioned around 60,000 kroner extra a year as an example. Of course, that could vary and depend on how much the shop already sold.
On Amino and among the entrepreneurs and businesspeople I spoke to, the reaction was: Bloody hell, that’s clever. They saw a product that could give customers value and the shop more money. Perhaps not many people would actually use the long return period.
I saw the offer as honest because consumers had a choice and could accept or decline. It could be really good for some. Others would buy it as a kind of insurance or reassurance.
Then the idea was reproduced on EPN, where some of my blog posts also appeared. There I met consumers reacting completely differently. I was called a fraudster, and the idea was called humbug and dishonest. I found some reactions very extreme.
At the same time, I could see the question from consumers’ side: If, as a businessman, I think few will use the service, is it a real product?
Can you sell reassurance?
I compared it with insurance. Only a few people’s houses burn down too. In my opinion, that doesn’t itself make insurance dishonest.
I also used alarm companies and Dansikring as a very forceful example. In the video, I claimed 99 per cent of their products were effectively about reassurance rather than arriving and catching a burglar. I described customers sleeping well or going on holiday feeling someone was looking after the house. That was my polemical comparison, not a study of any particular company’s products or performance.
My thought was that reassurance could have value for customers too. But that didn’t change feeling hurt at being called greedy, dishonest, unethical or a bastard. That’s not how I see myself. I could understand the idea looking like that from another perspective, while to my audience it looked like honest business.
A sharp example of seeing a situation from outside
In the video, I made a harsh comparison with people sitting at home with coffee and pastries watching TV-Avisen. I imagined them seeing Danish soldiers in Afghanistan who’d forced a captured opponent to squat for 12 hours and immediately saying: That’s torture. How can you treat others like that?
I contrasted that with the soldier’s experience of being shot at and having grenades thrown at him before capturing an opponent who’d tried to kill him. In my rhetoric back then, I described the opponent as a terrorist who’d blown people up and used expressions such as Taliban devils.
I asked whether critics had been there themselves and could understand the situation. In the video, I played down the 12 hours squatting from the soldier’s perspective. It was a provocative comparison I used to discuss different perspectives; I wasn’t describing a specific, documented event.
I extended the image with a cork gun: If the soldier were sent with one because the opponent mustn’t be hurt, he could be killed himself. Then parents, a younger brother and a girlfriend would lose him. That was my stark illustration of also trying to understand the speaker’s circumstances.
A Danish business competes around the world
I drew a parallel with business. My blunt claim was that around 90 per cent of its thinking concerned making money and surviving competition from Asia and the US, among others. That was my assessment in the video, not a measurement of other companies’ motives.
I used our SPAMfighter products as an example. I described competition with Chinese companies that could have labour at a tenth of the price and American companies with a much larger home market and greater volume from the start.
I said only two or three per cent, or at least under ten per cent, of our revenue came from Denmark. My point wasn’t to whine, but to say we competed worldwide.
I acknowledged some companies could sell in a way every consumer found completely fair. Hats off to them. But I described our market as full throttle and used the expression that anything went. Give an inch, in my view, and the company could be gone the next day, along with 50 Danish jobs and exports in the region of 50 to 60 million kroner. That was the pressure I tried to help others understand.
The price of serving a particular audience
If you have a clearly defined target audience, as I do with entrepreneurs and businesspeople, you can face a moral dilemma. What’s seen as normal and accepted in one world can be seen as fraud and humbug in another.
I don’t have the perfect solution. I find it difficult and hard to be slagged off. I dislike it, and it particularly upsets me when people attack my honesty.
Perhaps that’s part of the price of specialising in a particular segment: Different people view morality and ethics differently, and you have to live with being called a pig and an arsehole. Perhaps you need to concentrate on serving your target audience and shut out the rest. I just find it difficult.
Please leave your comment. I haven’t got it sorted in my head.
Best wishes, Martin
Problemmet med den, til tider, manglende etik og moral i den internationale konkurrence skyldes jo at der ikke er konsensus i verden omkring etiske spørgsmål. Man kan sige at fagbevægelsen har spillet fallit ved at springe globaliseringen og internationaliseringen over. Hvor er danske LOs kontor i Kina, Indien og Japan ? Når der ikke er fælles konsensus bliver det markedet der bestemmer og markedet er ligesom cykelrytterne i Tour de France presset voldsomt fra alle sider. Derfor er "doping", eller etisk moralsk tvivlsomme metoder fristende.
@1 Thorborg:> Hvorfor har du det dårligt når du bliver svinet til og beskyldt for uærlighed ? Er du konfliktsky ? Eller føler du i virkeligheden er kritikkerne har en smule ret, set ud fra deres vinkel ?
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