For those of you who don’t follow, Consumerist is a consumer-advocate blog run by Gawker Media. Hard times have hit everyone, it seems, and Gawker can’t afford to maintain all of their sites. So they’ve put the worst performers up for sale.

Consumerist is in a tough spot because it doesn’t bring in any direct revenue. How’s that? Well, as a blog that points out the bad behavior of big companies, Consumerist is ethically bound not to accept any advertising—as if any company would dare to purchase some. Instead, Gawker counts on the blog to bring traffic to other sites within its network. So, I suppose if something’s got to give, a site with no effective income is the place to start.

“How does Consumer Reports do it?” you might ask. Their situation is similar in that they cannot accept any ads or even demonstration products as it might potentially bias their work. To make money, they have to charge subscriptions—even on their website. It works well enough to keep them in business, but it keeps a resource for good out of reach for many people.

Why blog about this? Because it goes back to the key question Design Less Better is wrestling with at the moment: How does one make money being ethical?

We don’t know yet, but we will venture to say that if advertising and subscriptions are your only ideas for making money online, you are screwed. Not just if you’re ethical, but in general. Nobody likes ads, that’s why they block them. Subscriptions don’t work out, either. These revenue sources do not take well to the web. The medium —and the customers— tend to flow around them. The sooner we figure out alternative business models that don’t annoy customers, the better for everyone.

That’s a tall order, especially if we’re striving for the highest ethics. I’m not saying we have the answer, but we’re cooking something up that may work for ourselves. We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I hope someone smart buys Consumerist and figures out a way to keep it going. They’ve helped a lot of people and have been a great resource as we build the Taxonomy of Unethical Designs. It would be a shame to see it disappear.

This was really sticking in my craw, not because I think the world of corporate branding is morally comprehensible, but because I honestly believed that brand hypocrisy didn’t work. So BP’s rebrand was chewing at me. Did I just miss the boat here?

The answer hit me in an unlikely place: the in the comments of an article about BP’s recent technical woes at America’s largest oil field. Let’s read the comment that was my lightning rod.

The focus of the article was the numerous challenges faced by the oil industry in general. They even specifically mentioned that in an overview of the story. Guess it’s easy and popular to take shots at BP.

Hold on. Why is it easy and popular?

I’ve got an idea.

I’ll tell you why: Because BP’s brand-reality dissonance is totally obvious, and it’s putting people on the defensive. How can I know this? Because that’s exactly what it did to me. I saw that brand on thirty gas stations in my town and my bullshit detector almost exploded. Without knowing why, I knew something was up. And so does everyone else. At least that’s my theory.

Which some totally bootleg Google testing shows to be a good one. I Googled the name of each of the six supermajors in combination with the word "unethical." Look at my results:

^* Total S.A. is a bit of a tricky case for my dubious methods. You’ll notice that because of the word "total," the ungrouped query returns a lot of results (76,700), but, for example, none of the front-page results are for Total S.A. The grouped-term query returns significantly fewer (710).

What this tells me, with at least some degree of likelihood, is that the scrutiny BP has to endure in consequence of its clear brand-reality dissonance is at least 200% (and it seems to me likely something more like 400%) more than similar companies, who, from a brand perspective "hide in plain sight."

Further, Google has some circumstantial evidence that suggests that BP doesn’t inspire the investor confidence the other supermajors do. Below is a stock chart for the six supermajors between Dec 31, 2004 and May 7, 2008. At the beginning of 2005, all six supermajors are priced almost exactly equally. By the middle of 2007, BP’s growth (the blue line) is the lowest at +22.50%. The second lowest growth for an oil major is Royal Dutch Shell at +41.67%, with ConocoPhillips rising over 100%.

Stock ticker for the six supermajors between Dec 31, 2004 and May 7, 2008.

I’m not saying that coincidence implies correlation here, but it does make me wonder.

A while back, we posted a Twitter taxonomy which included the bot, “a character that spams non-original content as part of a larger kind of humorous or pithy zeitgeist”. Excuse of the Day is one example. But what about a character played by a person to similar effect?

The Mars Phoenix probe was the first one of these I followed, so although another name might be more appropriate, I’m going to stick with calling them bots. Phoenix was notable because instead of a quote-a-day it was used as a marketing/ educational tool of sorts. The probe would give updates on itself and answer questions. The gesture of Twittering gave what could have been a dry scientific mission some personality.

Until the mission ended, the identity of @MarsPhoenix was not widely known. I’m glad that they did this as it kept some of the magic alive. If you didn’t know who it was, then it might as well be from a robot on Mars. It was understood, however, that the Tweets were coming from someone at official at NASA. When you’re marketing something, accountability is important.

But what if you are marketing for someone, presumably as them, and they don’t know about it? That’s what happened over the summer as a group of fans pretended to be the characters of Mad Men on Twitter, without the okay from AMC.

On the web, anyone can be Don Draper, but should they?
Image from SNL short: Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women.

Marketer Paul Isakson was the first to play a bot, taking on the role of advertising executive Don Draper. He was later joined by an entire troupe of writers playing his family and co-workers. As the show’s second season progressed, the Twitter feeds revealed tantalizing hints about the characters’ downtime between episodes, as if there was a portal between the Internet and AMC’s fictional world of 1962.

Although it was underground, the effort seemed legitimate: high-resolution backgrounds; Twitter pages linked to the official Mad Men website. Only when the accounts were shut down did it become clear that what seemed like a smart play by AMC wasn’t their play at all. This week, Isakson admitted to starting the project as a form of research. “Basically”, he said, “to see if it would work”.

While the project seems to have been successful, was it right for the troupe to tweet under false (or at least omitted) pretenses? At least Fake Steve Jobs tells you he’s fake.

AMC has assumed ownership of the accounts and the tweeting will likely continue in some form, but I feel as though the fun is over now that the works have been exposed. Which brings me to a conundrum:

It’s a better experience following fictional personalities if you don’t know who the writers are, but at some level, you need to know whether the character is sanctioned (or not) so you know how to take what they say.

What do you think? Sounds to me like a design ethics problem.

When I hear Tim O’Reilly talk about Twitter as an emerging medium, this is the kind of thing I think about. What does white hat microblogging look like?

The big ideal? What’s that again?

The heart of the rebrand involved changing the company’s name to BP (back from BP-Amoco, the result of a recent mega-merger), creating a wordmark in which small letters were used ("bp" was thought to have fewer imperialist associations than the erstwhile "BP"), and finally implementing a new corporate tagline, "beyond petroleum."

BP’s then CEO John Browne said: "It’s all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites." And it apparently did: During more than a decade with Browne as chief executive (ending last year), BP’s market value rose fivefold and its share price rose 250 percent.

Then BP PR advisor Peter Sandman described the rebranding project as an example of a company adopting the "reformed sinner" persona. Sandman notes that this "works quite well if you can sell it…[huge oil companies] can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realised we were bad guys and we are going to be better.’ It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys…"

The "if you can sell it" bit may have proved not to have quite the legs Sandman anticipated, though. Skepticism in rampant not only among activists, but also in the maintream media. Fortune magazine’s Cait Murphy addressed BP’s billboards touting its involvement in renewable energy, "here’s a novel advertising strategy — pitch your least important product and ignore your most important one… If the world’s second-largest oil company is beyond petroleum, Fortune is beyond words."

CorpWatch researcher Kenny Bruno was even more blunt: “BP’s re-branding as the Beyond Petroleum company is perhaps the ultimate co-optation of environmentalists’ language and message. Even apart from the twisting of language, BP’s suggestion that producing more natural gas is somehow akin to global leadership is preposterous. Make that Beyond Preposterous.”

BP Exec by Nick Turner (Via)

As it turns out, BP’s critics were not far off base. BP’s record of environmental protection has been no better than other oil companies’. Brand-reality dissonance abounds:

For example, while BP has staked out the brand-coherent public position of supporting of the Kyoto protocol - unlike the major American oil companies - Greenpeace New Zealand discovered in May 2002 that despite this, it continued to participate in a coalition lobbying the government not to ratify the convention. BP claimed that this was untrue, a claim which Greenpeace ultimately rejected, pointing to a February 2002 report produced on behalf of the coalition, which listed the Greenhouse Policy Coalition (GPC), of which BP is a member, among its members. The Chair of the GPC itself wrote an opinion column for a New Zealand newspaper titled "Nothing to gain from Kyoto Protocol."

In June 2005, The Independent reported that BP "has been privately lobbying in Washington to block legislation to introduce a mandatory curb on greenhouse gases in the U.S." In response, Environmental Defense’s Peter Goldmark noted that BP’s lobbying "is completely at odds with its record and its public statements." Clean Air Watch called BP guilty of "greenwashing on epic proportions."

In August 2007, Advertising Age reported that BP had received a permit to increase the amount of toxic discharges they dump into the Great Lakes. Chicago’s chief environmental officer remarked, "We’d like to have [BP] live up to their advertising."

AdAge called BP’s move "the cardinal sin of touting an environmentally conscious image in marketing — the central focus of BP’s advertising for the past several years — and failing to live up to the message."

If it ain’t broke?

Cardinal sin indeed. But so what? I can now personally attest to the fact that it works, not only on a micro-level, but on a macro level as well. So why should BP care about the ethics of their strategy? If brand-reality hypocrisy works so well, why change up? After all, isn’t it just the self-righteous sense of doing good that we’re after?

I don’t think so. And I’ll tell you why on Wednesday.

References

1. John Browne steps down abruptly from BP; International Herald Tribune, 2007-05-01
2. BP goes green; BBC, 2000-07-24
3. bp: Beyond Petroleum? in Battling Big Business: Countering greenwash, infiltration and other forms of corporate bullying, Eveline Lubbers (ed.), Green Books (Devon, UK, 2002, pp. 26-32).
4. Greenpeace challenges oil industry to outline routemap to renewable energy future; Greenpeace Press Release 2001-01-31
5. BP at Sourcewatch
6. Packaging the Beast: A Public Relations Lesson in Type Casting; PR Watch, 1996

BP is the world’s third largest global energy company, is among the largest private sector energy corporations in the world, that is one of the six supermajors (vertically integrated private sector oil exploration, natural gas, and petroleum product marketing companies).

Now just look at that logo: The lush variegated greens, the beautiful, regular geometry and the holistic gaia-esque overtones: I feel like I’m looking at the planet earth through the dreaming eyes of James Lovelock. Which are eyes I like: I have to admit the first time I came across a BP in my town, I stopped there for gas. There’s no doubt something about this strategy works.

That said, is it just me, or is something about it a little fishy?

For one thing, only a cursory amount of internet research indicates that BP is leading the expansion of oil exploration on the sensitive Atlantic Frontier. They also apparently spent $171,000 to help oppose a 1991 bill to improve tanker safety and to create a $500M spill response fund. Incidentally, that bill was motivated by a 300,000 gallon spill from a BP-charted oil tanker that severely disrupted the enviroment Huntingdon beach in California.

Telltale smears of black sludge, the remnants of an oil spill, stain California’s Huntington Beach. Via.

So here’s what I’m thinking about this week: What’s up with BP? It’s pretty clear that their design and advertising strategy is a flagrant appeal to a kind of environmentalism they just don’t practice. Meanwhile, they seem to be doing alright. Is this a disturbance in the Brand-Reality Corollary?

Between now and Wednesday, I plan to find out, and meanwhile hopefully gather some research that will prove useful in our continuing quest for a cogent design ethics. Until then.

Don’t just take our word for it. The critics totally dig the full game.

When you’re ready to take the plunge, you can purchase it on Steam (which we also like), or from WiiWare. ((I may go the Wii route over Christmas because I like waggle controls and it seems to be a bit more reasonably priced than the PC version ($15 vs. $20)))

Postscript

Before you call it to our attention, yes I am aware developer Ron Carmel recently stated that 90% of WoG installs appear to be pirated. WoG has no DRM, so as anti-DRM proponents one might consider this egg on our face. Aside from an obvious counterexample, let me tell you why I am not yet swayed after hearing this news.

While 90% seems like a high number, what does it actually mean? What’s the typical piracy rate for a AAA game with DRM versus an indie game with none? Is 90% outrageous or par for the course? Is it perhaps good? What was the total number sold—90% of what? It’s pretty shoddy reporting on the part of Joystiq and Kotaku to put such flamebait out there without any kind of analysis. Before we can seriously debate the ethics of DRM and piracy, I think we need some ethical journalism first.

Yesterday, Paul mentioned a few things designers could do to prevent or mitigate the damage from missing parts. In today’s post, I want to draw attention to his second white-hat solution: using standardized parts in designs.

There are a lot of non-standard parts floating around today’s designs: strange battery types; odd Scandinavian screws; hacky code. These may allow the designer more freedom (or just make their job easier), but they take freedom away from the end-user.

If a customer can’t wait for the company to respond with a missing part, they should be able to go to the store and quickly get a replacement. Whenever possible, using standardized parts instead of that 15/16″ septagonal bolt is bound to save the day even when your company can’t.

But standards alone aren’t enough. It is possible to use standardized pieces that customers can’t understand and/or easily replace at the store. I’m talking about proprietary standards.

Proprietary vs. Open Standards

A proprietary standard is something that is certainly not a one-off part, but it is a closed system—a single vendor controls it. It’s a way of getting you to keep coming back to a company for parts, whether you need them to fix your mistake or theirs. Those Microsoft libraries for your web app or cell phone chargers for your iPhone are common enough, but it’s not like they are universal. You can’t swap these parts with other things you have around. Moreover, it is possible to have a standardized part with proprietary access. That screw might be typical, but if the head needs a special Nintendo screwdriver, it’s impossible to tell what to get to replace a lost one. Your neighbor can’t come over and fix it your Gameboy if she can’t open it up.

Open standards, then, are the way to go. The parts or accessories a customer needs to enjoy your design should be available. Failing this, they should also be findable and cognizable. In other words, Phillips-head screws, AA batteries, USB, open source standards-compliant CSS—these are good things.

Enter the Matrix

Let’s formalize this:

Imagine there’s a piece missing in the little plastic baggie that came with your latest purchase. Let’s look at the situation under four different conditions:

Open standards are best. They offer the most ways for you or anyone else to help fix your broken user experience. You’ve probably got what you need around the house or at your local store. There are so many options available, you can spend a lot or a little, as you like.

Proprietary standards are okay. A company makes your part for many of its products, so it’s not like it’s impossible to find one. Expect to pay for the privilege, though. Apple Store, anyone?

Non-standard open parts are less okay. It is probably a one-off or uncommon part, but at least someone is nice enough to tell you as much. Maybe they’ve got directions for how to make or modify one, so you or one of your smarter friends can still make it work. Time to fire up the iron smelter.

Non-standard proprietary parts are the worst. If you can figure out what you need, you will certainly be at the mercy of the company who made it. Presuming they still make the piece, it’s not likely something a store would stock. You’ll have to call and order it special and even then you might not be able to install it yourself. You’re in a spot you shouldn’t be in — some designer dropped the ball.

Be generous

Send me an extra screw, you jerks. (Image via.)

If you make design and logistical decisions using a mentality of maximizing profits, the logical conclusions will all have zero tolerance for error. Case in point the bag of hardware: There is no doubt that sending exactly the correct amount of hardware is the most cost-effective option for these companies, which is why that’s what they do. However, when the factory screws up, it costs them huge, leading to frustrated customers, employees, and balance sheets. If they had just planned to throw an extra washer in every bag, they wouldn’t have any of these problems.

And the same goes for you: If you sell Wordpress templates, your customers are going to be a lot less likely to gripe at that inadvertently non-semantic bit of XHTML if you just so happened to unexpectedly give them a really great plugin for free as part of the transaction. If you sell used books on Amazon, and you ship them with awesome homemade bookmarks, people are going to remember you, and buy from you again. And when you make a mistake, they’re going to be a lot more likely to forgive you. People want free schlock. It makes them feel great, which makes you look great. It also goes a long way toward assuaging their frustration when something goes wrong. So be generous, and it’ll pay dividends.

Standardize

Secondly, where standards apply, use them. Again, I can’t find a fourth super-cool Sweedish-designed 15/16″ septagonal bolt to make up for the one you failed to send me. And if I buy a template or a library or some vector graphics from you, if they’re built in non-standard ways, I’m going to be pretty ticked off. So lesson number two is to practice some restraint. Unless it’s critical to the design of your thing, use a standard part where it’s possible to do so.

It seems to me that another reason why companies make mistakes like this is not merely because of cost, but simply because they don’t care that much about little things like nuts and bolts. A cracked or missing shelf gets most of the attention because it is easy to spot and expensive to replace, but a cheap bit of metal in a bag goes unnoticed.

Doing the right thing starts with the smallest thing. It doesn’t take much to ruin an experience. It’s happened to all of us, at one time or another: an expensive stereo with a remote that doesn’t come with batteries; a fancy bed-and-breakfast with no shampoo in the shower; no pickle with your sandwich. If that little thing was there as it should be, you’d probably never notice, but when it’s missing, the whole design gestalt can be compromised.

Step one, then, is not to overlook the nuts and bolts. No hardware, no bookshelf.

Step two is to ask: what’s your system for making sure the nuts and bolts are always there? And, if they’re missing, how quickly can that mistake be fixed?

I like Paul’s simple solution of adding more hardware, but for something that critical, there has to be a backup plan. Are there clear instructions on what to do if pieces go missing? Is it easy for the customer to ask for them? How quickly can they be replaced? Make it right; get the user experience back on track.

We can take a lesson from the Simpsons. When Lisa and Marge discover their Vincent Price’s Egg Magic is missing vital egg feet, they call the number on the box and Price’s grandson Jody promptly hand-delivers them. Now that’s design ethics in action!

For your homework, take a step back from the big things for a moment and look at the small stuff in your user experience. What little pieces have to be there to ensure that it is complete? Now, what kind of support system do you have in place to make sure they are where they need to be? Sweat the small stuff.

Has this ever happened to you? You buy a product that requires some assembly, get it home, grab your screwdrivers or allen wrenches, open up that little bag of nuts and bolts only to find that you’re missing one? Good god, that is frustrating. Talk about a waste of everyone’s time and money.

Since this has happened to me at least a few times, I can only expect that it’s happening all the time to these companies. Now, maybe some people don’t call the company (I myself sometimes just live with it, or take it back to the mega-store I bought it at, etc.), but I bet some others do just about every day.

I’ve got two solutions to this problem, both of which illustrate the possibility that a company can save itself time and money by making decisions that are more concerned with customer satisfaction than they are with maximizing profits. I know, it’s mind-boggling. But that’s why we’re here. (Full disclosure: We haven’t really argued that the maximizing-profits mentality is fundamentally unethical. But if it turns out that it’s not, I think the point that it’s less effective is still solid.)

First option: Just dump a few extra pieces of hardware in each little bag. My guess is that the total cost to the manufacturer for the hardware on a given thing is a few pennies. Let’s say dropping a few more screws and bolts in there, then, costs them about one cent. On the other hand, that extra person manning the customer service desk probably costs them 25 or 30 thousand a year, not to mention postage on sending out that one extra stupid screw several hundred times. Even if the math doesn’t pan out, just pass the costs directly on to me. It’s always insulted my intelligence when something costs $19.99 anyway.

Finally, if you employ this option, your customers will love you, as opposed to cursing you bitterly as they drive around town looking for a 15/16″ septagonal bolt.

Second option: Make all the hardware your thing uses standard sizes. Even more incredibly insulting is when I’m missing a bolt that you I can’t buy at my neighborhood hardware store! What is that about? The only two options I can think of are (1) plain old shoddy design, or (2) some kind of mad-scientist style logic where proprietary hardware is somehow a competitive edge. Either way, it’s a clear case of FAIL.

Quick, generalize!

Assuming that you’re not actually in charge of the decisions about what hardware to include in my next IKEA bookshelf, I hope I haven’t lost your interest already, because I’m going to try to generalize this all on Wednesday.