ROI. A concept without values?

Is the return-on-investment mindset winning the battle of good and evil?

We are fortunate to live in a 'free' market. Like many, I am convinced that this is a valuable form of market economy. Prosperity seems to thrive in a market that offers equal opportunities for all.

Our legislators set the moral goalposts — the values within which we must play the game. Within that playing field, business is about return on investment. Make it in-house or outsource? How much does it cost and what does it yield? The more, the better. End of discussion, right?

Until a few decades ago, society had all kinds of moral pillars with ethical convictions. About good and evil. About the Ten Commandments, about values like freedom, equality and fraternity. People belonged to a church and a sports club, read a particular newspaper and were members of a political party.

This gave people stability, direction and identity. You belonged somewhere. You were connected to others through values that meant something.

Today we live in a new era with far more individualism, more knowledge and infinitely more information. A time in which media offerings are hyper-fragmented and in which we all contribute to the news.

Thanks to Blendle, I read interesting pieces from all newspapers and am no longer aware of the values that individual newspaper brands stand for.

We also live in a time when (inter)national business wields considerable political and social power. I'm referring to practices where tax advantages are negotiated with national governments.

The executives of large organisations earn a multiple of the salary of the leaders of our country.

And major brands strongly influence our behaviour through commercial communications — behaviour aimed at stimulating consumption and purchase, so that the financial performance of organisations improves. And gross domestic product is pushed further upward.

Financial return seems to dominate our business thinking. You'd almost start wondering whether anything else exists. Or whether what is truly valuable is reserved for our private lives.

Good and evil

It wasn't always this way. Czech economist Tomáš Sedláček takes us through the history of economic thought in his book Economics of Good and Evil, showing how strongly moralising it has been through the ages. The Bible, Aristotle, Adam Smith — economic theory has always been accompanied by ideas about good and evil.

Smith, widely regarded as the founding father of the free market through his book The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a moral philosopher. He believed that the pursuit of self-interest would automatically serve the public interest. The 'invisible hand' of the free market ensures harmony and balance.

Smith assumed that incentives for self-enrichment would lead to greater equality in the distribution of money and prosperity. In short, his economic theory served all kinds of ethical and moral values.

This theory seemed to work well for a long time — but appears to have more or less stalled over the past decade.

The perverse incentives for self-enrichment in business have now become so great that ethics are often hard to find. We see increasingly grasping behaviour among politicians, organisational executives, and many entrepreneurs who start companies with the sole real purpose of making large profits.

Production processes are outsourced to low-wage countries, people are interchangeable production units and business operations are steered by hard financial metrics.

As I write this, there is widespread public outrage over the excessive pay rises for the chief bankers of ABN AMRO and ING. And recently, a number of VVD politicians have displayed unethical behaviour.

People around me are angry and indignant. Sometimes it all feels like a great parody. The amount of black money and white-collar crime in our country has become alarming.

The Dutch Court of Audit calculated that in the Netherlands, approximately 16 billion euros were laundered in 2010 alone. Through various legal-financial constructions, this has become extraordinarily profitable.

Where have moral and ethical values gone?

In my own field, 'brand marketing', we have all been busily working with Simon Sinek's golden circle of late. Everyone is now rightly asking their clients the 'why' question — or clients are asking us, because they often no longer know clearly why they exist themselves.

And we are seeing what I consider a welcome development: companies like Unilever have now formulated a Social Mission and are trying to make a positive social contribution worldwide through their Sustainable Living Plan.

Or Tony's Chocolonely, which makes me happy with their fair, slave-free chocolate.

Sikko Gerkema responded to my earlier blog Is honest marketing really an illusion with apt quotes from the book Manager Meets Monk — about conversations between Benedictine monk Anselm Grün and Jochen Zeitz, CEO of Puma.

I'll quote a few valuable lines:

"When companies despise values, they eventually become worthless. For whoever despises values ultimately despises people and thus also themselves. Values keep us and our coexistence healthy and strengthen collaboration.

Honesty and transparency I would like to call truthfulness. I act in such a way that I honour the other and preserve my own honour.

Truthfulness means first and foremost behaviour of a person towards themselves. Truthful is the one who is in accordance with their inner being.

Whoever is truthful in this way also tells the truth and thereby expresses in their entire behaviour that they are reliable, that they mean what they say and how they behave.

Truthfulness is the virtue that leads us to be entirely ourselves, to be authentic. The truthful person is always also a reliable person.

And a company that writes truthfulness on its banner and tries to live by it will radiate trustworthiness to its customers.

This gives them a sense of security.

Values honour the dignity of people; values we embody.

You could say that the person who lives by them is themselves that value.

The value of money, however, is measurable — money has value but is not a value.

Thus the difference between values in themselves and the value of money becomes clear even in language.

One means being; the other means having."

Amen. I couldn't put it more aptly myself.

Alongside the rise of values-based thinking, we have seen an extremely strong growth of ROI thinking in recent years. Not only in traditional old-school marketing and communication do we want to know which investments yield the highest return — it has now become a buzzword for all new digital communication too.

When online marketers talk about 'content', it often has nothing to do with relevant values but is entirely about ratios of traffic, likes, shares, leads and above all the magic word ROI.

That is a great shame, because in the online world it seems to me that it is precisely emotional value that moves people — and companies with their hearts in the right place are often wildly popular.

I notice that I see Richard Branson (Virgin), Ricardo Semler (Semco) and Tony Hsieh (Zappos) pop up daily on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet Virgin, Semco and Zappos are not, as far as I know, very active in the Dutch market.

They are companies that haven't lost their purpose and whose leaders do everything to nurture a valuable culture and express it through their brand. They are our new heroes.

ROI thinking leads to value-free or value-less thinking. The disadvantage of all that ROI thinking is that you automatically start acting purely on the basis of measurable direct results, and then no longer need to think about moral value.

You become lazy, because it automatically relieves you of the responsibility to keep acting from values and conviction — after all, the numbers speak for themselves and drive the content.

Where is the valuable contribution of the non-conformists from the creative industry?

As with all good things in life, this is not about choosing one or the other. To return briefly to Adam Smith in 1776: he was convinced that free incentives for self-enrichment and a fair and prosperous society were natural extensions of each other.

The question I ask myself is how the creative industry — with its wilfully independent free thinkers, visionary minds and artists in image and word who are so important for improving and developing prosperity — can once again make a positive contribution to society.

Is it not now the time for a new generation of creatives to stand up and make themselves heard? To once again develop ethical value through commercial communication? Or should I not count on that and trust that our politicians and business leaders will do this alone?

PS: I am looking for good examples of Dutch organisations that have successfully flourished from a social 'Purpose'. Suggestions are welcome!

This blog is also published on Adformatie / Marketingonline.