Business Ethics is about helping customers to make the choices in their best interest. Are you making their lives better?
Cake Mix
Several years ago, I watched the excellent four-part BBC documentary “The Century of the Self”. In one episode, the topic of public relations and market research was addressed. Following World War II, there was an unprecedented explosion of goods available to U.S. consumers. Betty Crocker had just released its boxed cake mix, but was surprised that sales weren’t as high as they anticipated. 
Market researchers set up a series of focus groups of housewives around the product. What emerged from the discussions was fascinating. The task of making a cake had become so easy relative to their prior experience, housewives actually felt guilty by using the cake mix. This may be unfathomable by today’s standards. Nevertheless, the researchers thought about how to alleviate that guilt. The group decided to have the user simply add an egg to the recipe. Amazingly, this simple act had the desired effect. Sales of the Betty Crocker cake mix soared and the process of baking a cake for the family had become much less difficult.
Hang Ups
All of us have hang ups over something. We all have expectations of ourselves and ideas about what we should be doing or how we ought to be behaving. For the most part these mechanisms of self-regulation serve a vital purpose. Internal regulation keeps us from surrendering to our vices or participate in self-destructive activities.
Sometimes, however, our self-regulation mechanisms hinder us. They keep us from enjoying aspects of our lives or from making our lives easier. There is a difference between living frugally and living a Spartan lifestyle. There is a difference between eating healthily and complete self-denial of tasty foods.
Maintaining a healthy degree of perspective allows us the opportunity to enjoy some minor excesses from time to time, without caving to self-destruction. There is much in life to enjoy and our lives are not enriched through deprivation.
Business Ethics
This brings us to the topic of business ethics. The main goal of any business is to help customers to be, do, or have something that they wouldn’t otherwise. Businesses are built to satisfy customer desires. I find absolutely nothing unethical about helping housewives abandon self-constraining hang-ups concerning easily baking a cake. In fact, I find that wonderfully benevolent. That being said, purposely eroding individuals’ methods of self-regulation is not something to take lightly and too many companies have no compunction for doing so, regardless of how destructive it is. Today, we have social media platforms that feed into self-segregation and “othering.” We have credit providers that offer “generous terms” to lull individuals into indentured servitude. We have created a consumer culture that encourages people to spend money they don’t have on stuff they really don’t want because they “deserve it.”
I love companies who try their hardest to enhance the lives of their customers, not enabling them in their own destruction. Does that mean losing out on some profits? Maybe in the short term. But healthy and content citizens make better customers who usually end up with more money to spend on your wares. In the end, though, we can look back and say we made people’s lives better.
Isn’t that why we start businesses in the first place?
