The School of Visual Arts in New York City is cranking up the nation’s first-ever master’s program in branding, led by Debbie Millman to help students focus on what Pacific-Standard magazine calls “the intricacies of how words, images, and design help shape public perception, opinion, and belief.”
But something clanged at me in Paul Hilbert’s Q-and-A with Millman, in which she sloughed off a question of ethics:
Hilbert’s Question: When a company such as Unilever owns both the Dove brand, with its successful “Campaign for Real Beauty,” and Axe grooming products, which appears to champion the stereotypical sexism Dove is trying to undermine, is this an example of hypocrisy or simply excellent branding?
Millman’s Answer: It’s a conundrum because you have two very different brands with very different mindsets. One is sort of a political stance, while the other is more of a sexual stance. Holding companies have different brand managers in charge of creating each product’s position in the marketplace and reason for being. So, again, you can have two different brands with two different souls. Whether or not you can justify having both in the same portfolio is a matter of what the board of directors and shareholders believe is possible.
I also think we’re living in a multidimensional world where different needs and different points of view are all valid. So I think it’s up to the consumer to decide whether or not they want to buy into those different mindsets—literally or figuratively. And that’s the great thing about being the consumer these days: Corporations aren’t creating brands for any other reason than to reach people, and if they don’t reach people the corporations aren’t going to make them. If we don’t buy them, they don’t get made. We have so much more power than we’ve ever had as a culture.
Translated question: What should marketers do about working for hypocritical companies? (Unilever has been criticized for the Axe vs. Dove conundrum among other issues.)
Translated answer: That’s not a question for marketers. That’s a question for the board and the shareholders.
If she could revise and extend her remarks, at some point I’d hope that Millman would mention that everyone, including folks who brand for a living, are able to step back as autonomous moral agents and decide for themselves whether they have been placed in ethically untenable situations, even if that placing is done by people in the boardroom or by shareholders. It seems ethically unsatisfying for someone in a master’s program, or anyone else seeking a higher level of self-actualization or thought, to leave such high-level ethical questions to others. The notion that companies “aren’t creating brands for any other reason than to reach people” obviously comes with ethical questions. (As Michael Moore crudely put it: “So why doesn’t GM sell crack? If profit is supreme, why not sell crack?”)
The new marketing program’s curriculum mentions “business ethics” in its MBA 101 program, along with accounting, cost analysis, operations, product liability and intellectual design. Here’s hoping that such hard questions are asked, so students can answer them for themselves.