How do you get credit for your good deeds? A 2015 paper considers this problem. The authors suggest that informing people of your good deeds can backfire. People attribute impure motives to anyone who draws attention to their good deeds. A similar issue occurs for companies. So, should firms advertise their good deeds?
A Moral Or Pragmatic Question?
There are two ways of looking at the question of whether firms should advertise their good deeds. One a moral question. Is it morally correct to advertise good deeds? I’ll address that below.
The other question is more pragmatic. Will it help or hurt the firm’s business to advertise the things it does well? This second question is closer to the one addressed in the research paper. The paper largely addresses individuals’ actions but extrapolates this to firms. Their finding is that ‘bragging’ about a pro-social deed helps improve the person’s reputation but only if the deed was not previosuly known about. If the deed was known about beforehand there can be a backlash, as people judge the ‘braggart’ for not having a pure motive.
Thus, bragging has a positive effect when prosocial behavior is unknown because it informs others that an actor has behaved generously. However, bragging does not help—and often hurts—when prosocial behavior is already known, because it signals a selfish motive.
Berman et al., 2015, page 90
Firms And Individuals
The authors don’t claim a one-to-one mapping between people and firms. How we judge firms is different to how we judge people. That said, they do suggest a similar dynamic is likely to exist.
Advertising firms’ CSR initiatives may also backfire if it is clear that a company is trying to directly
Berman et al., 2015, page 102
benefit as a result of its good deeds….
Their results make sense. In a world we motives are perceived to matter, there can be pragmatic reasons not to wish to be seen to be actively pursuing credit for good deeds. That said, I wouldn’t want to apply too many lessons from the way we see people to the way we see firms. I also wouldn’t want to hide a firm’s good deeds too much, especially as consumers often don’t know much about firms. This means, assuming it is true, that telling consumers that your firm is better than most is probably news to them and so a good thing from a business perspective.
Should Firms Advertise Their Good Deeds?
Morally, yes, absolutely. We as a society need to get away from the idea of punishing “braggarts” when they are actually are genuinely doing good. (Feel free to punish those who claim good deeds but don’t do them). If people don’t get rewarded for their good deeds, they will do less of them. We, however, really want more good deeds. To my mind the idea that good deeds should be done anonymously is a relic of an older time when posh, rich people wanted to look classy. Bollocks to that.
Nowadays, social media is full of people overstating what they have achieved. So, let’s reward those who actually do good deeds rather than people who create vanity rockets or those who claim that they now have washboard abs. (BTW no one does, it is always just a trick of clever lighting).
It is a similar thing with firms. If society rewards firms for good deeds, we’ll get more of them. That makes sense to me — let’s do that. If you want firms to do their good deeds in the shadows, then we won’t know who to reward. That is kinda stupid. Should firms advertise their good deeds? Absolutely, yes.
How then should we react? We should react positively to hearing about positive actions. It isn’t really that complicated.
Bragging Or Advertising
One part of the article I wasn’t a huge fan of was the censorious tone towards marketing that can be taken by some researchers. The very first line of the abstract of the article was:
People often brag about, or advertise, their good deeds to others.
Berman et al., 2015, page 90
The conflation of advertising and bragging is a bit strange to see in the Journal of Marketing Research. Bragging has negative connotations. I don’t see why advertising should necessarily have those negative connotations. There is deceptive advertising and there is advertising products that harm people. That is bad advertising. But there is also advertising that tells people of a new, better solution to a genuine problem that they have. Why is that bad? It is strange to me if marketing researchers think that advertising is necessarily negative and bear some sort of hostility towards marketing. Marketing professor is a strange choice of job really if you think that there is something necessarily wrong with advertising. Still, I guess there are plenty of people in government who seem to hate the idea of government so maybe that quirkiness isn’t unique.
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Read: Jonathan Z. Berman, Emma E. Levine, Alixandra Barasch, and Deborah A. Small, (2015), “The Braggart’s Dilemma: On the Social Rewards and Penalties of Advertising Prosocial Behavior“, Journal of Marketing Research, 52(1)
