Cut the Capitals. Do Good Things.

On days when you think the world is all falling to bits and no-one is trying to fix it, go to see Ted. Pick a lecture and watch it. Each of their speakers is extraordinarily bright, positive, interesting and reassuring, in that you find out that someone is indeed working on fixing the problems we think everyone has forgotten about.

Last week I watched Nic Marks' talk about the Happy Planet Index, and as a result I joined his organisation, the New Economics Foundation, "economics as if people and the planet mattered". One of their suggestions is that in order to measure a country's success we ought not to look at growth or how rich everyone is, we ought to measure how happy the people are, measured against ecological sustainability. Using the HPI, Africa and the USA come out terribly. Latin America is miles ahead of the rest of the world. (Costa Rica wins.) Go visit and find out.

Coincidentally, I met a friend of mine last week at a do and found out that she works not far from me now, in the CSR department of a big multinational company.
"Let's get together one lunchtime," I said, and her brows furled.
"One evening?" I said.
"That would be better, because we don't really do lunchtimes," she said.

Now 'scuse me, but CSR stands for corporate social responsibility. I've long had a thing about CSR. I think that as soon as you reduce it to an abbreviation, and give it to a department to take care of, then it stops being a real responsibility for the company, and becomes the small place where you get to spend your tax deductible charity budget and make your organisation look as if it's behaving ethically. I was at a fundraising lunch given by Breast Cancer Care one day, expressed this view to the woman sitting next to me (from a huge UK retailer) and got a wry smile.
"Don't tell me! You work in the CSR department," I said.
"Yes, she said, "But I agree with you."

So what we end up with is a slight nod in the direction of doing some good things - because that's what corporate social responsibility is supposed to be about - while the rest of the organisation goes about the daily business of making masses of cash for the shareholders which, according to the New Economics Foundation's research, is pretty much guaranteed to make everyone concerned less happy sooner or later.

We know that volunteering makes people happy, and yet big organisations with their relatively large CSR budgets don't want happy staff; they want profitable staff. They're content to give money to charities so that someone else can do their social responsibility for them, but they still treat their own people like caged hamsters.

Let's dump the abbreviation, and even the silly name: corporate social responsibility. That only got invented so that it sat nicely on the agenda with financial reporting structures or management information systems or customer relationship marketing. Call it doing good things. Then do some. Start by giving your own staff enough time to take a walk, read a book and eat their lunch somewhere away from their own desks.

When Marketing Turns to the Dark Side

This week I got a text message that said:

FREEMSG: Our records indicate you may be entitled to 3750 pounds for the Accident you had. To claim for free reply with YES to this msg. To opt out text STOP.

So my first question to myself was, "If I text STOP, will they do so?" I thought, on balance, not. They'd already lied to me. I haven't had an accident (let alone an Accident) and I'm not on their records, unless you count them gleaning my number from somewhere public. So, their records can't show I've had an accident so that's lie number one. Would they charge me if I texted STOP? It doesn't say, so I suspect the answer is yes.
Would they charge me if I text YES? They say not, but I'm guessing that they would. All we know about them is that they are liars.

Another question was , "Shall I forward this to my friend Dave in the Met's Fraud Office?" I wonder if the police can do anything about scammers who earn £1 or £5 or who knows how much, by sending out mass texts.

Question number three is, "How many idiots are there in the world who would text back YES in the hope of being awarded 3750 of our British pounds for an accident they haven't had?" Enough to run a company? Or are they hoping to make money from the decent people out there who next STOP in order to prevent the scammers from trying again.

I've had cold calls from people offering to help me claim for "the accident I had recently", from companies who ignore the telephone preference service list that restricts my number. They try to talk me into "remembering" that I have had an accident. If not me, then perhaps a family member has had one, they suggest. A former neighbour spotted a dent in my vintage Saab (done by a large tattooed man wearing a vest and driving a truck) and told me he could get me £3500 compensation for my injury. "But I wasn't in it at the time." I said. "You just say you were," he told me. He said it was a "Win win." For him perhaps. Not for all of us who pay monthly to insure our cars, it's not. Not for me either, because even if I'd had the extra £3500 in the bank, I'd know that I'd stolen it and that would make me feel guilty and hence miserable.

It's calls, conversations and texts like this that tempt us to believe that business is all run by money-grabbing charlatans and marketed by crooks. But it's not. There are many of us out there doing business and being fair, working for organisations we're proud of, Let's not allow the scam artistes to take over marketing. By all means make a profit - how else are you to stay in business and pay the bills? - but let's be fair and honest and hold our heads up high. It's time to reclaim marketing for decent people. If you've got good examples, let me know. In the meantime, I'll report on the ones I spot, on the dark side and the bright, with the occasionally merely murky one along the way.