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Ever since recently rereading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the world appears to have polarised into good and evil. Right and wrong.
Politics has become about doing what’s right, wars are declared against tyrants, and countries led by bad men are branded as evil.
Businesses have grown to realise that being good not only looks good, it is good. And good can be good for business.
Parents strive to do the right things for their children. Good parents want their children to grow up into good people.
Some time ago, Google realised that their AdSense system was being abused by many websites. Thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of websites were setup to make their visitors click on ads without realising it. Google tightened up the rules – but was this because they were morally opposed to the deception, or because their advertisers started to realise that the content network was producing low-quality traffic?
If a PR company doesn’t believe in a product, should they take on the client?
As a matter of course, SoftwarePromotions turns away more companies than we send price quotes for. Last time I checked, we turned away three companies for every company we decided to work with.
But was this a moral decision,or a business one?
If a company doesn’t benefit from our services, the client loses and so do we. We get paid, but we also get another entry in our unhappy customer file.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two – a decision influenced by business and ethical considerations.
Our company has taken on products that we really believed in at lower cost. We worked with a company selling a beautifully simple financial management tool for a fraction of our lower rate. We believed in the product, and we thought that the initial investment would prove to be worthwhile.
And we’ve turned away products that we are morally opposed to, including gambling applications, violent games and more.
But these fall into the clear categories of good and bad. What about the examples that make you go hmmm?
If your company is in the business of selling, do you really believe in your product?
Do you believe in the claims that you make on your website?
Do you believe that your customers should be buying your product, and not those of your competition?
If so, does your website communicate your belief, your unwavering faith in your products and your absolute conviction that what you sell is best?
The world’s a lot simpler in two colours. So is selling your product.
Good theory. But if the PR company only work with products they truly believe in, they risk hunger and liquidation!
Ideology won’t pay your bills.
Interesting stuff Dave. Since you bring up Lord of the Rings, I’ll say that after watching Battlestar Galactica, it’s not hard to see all the other shades between black and white.
But even the clear categories for you are murky for me. We make games for a living, where do you draw the line on violence? (you won’t find a less violent game than Sneezies anywhere, and we like the family friendly tone, but it’s still a contentious point.)
Also, we have to deal with what we see as ethical concerns of our own in what we choose to make, if not in what clients we take on. We’re in a fairly hot market, the iPhone, which is often dominated by novelty throwaway software. But we feel like it’s our responsibility to ourselves and our customers to make games we love and believe in. We pour our hearts into what we do, we take our time to polish them, that’s an issue that feels ethical to us, and it certainly affects how we feel when we look in the mirror. I’d rather hope to make a comfortable living making something we can be proud of than spend my days trying to get rich making various bodily noises.
It’s creative integrity I suppose, which I guess makes up a part of what you’re talking about towards the end of the post. And there’s a pretty staggering number of shades of grey in that can of worms
, it seems more of a personal thing, “what are you comfortable with”, not something that you can or even should project onto others.
Nice post… I think it’d be more suited for a late night ramble over a bottle of wine than immortalized in black and white on a blog, but it makes for a nice change of pace on a monday morning.
Gavin – good point about BG; as a slightly obsessed fan, I know exactly what you’re saying.
As for drawing the line on violence in games, I agree. The lines are hazy. Yet your products at Antair Games are most definitely in the safe zone.
The most extreme example I have come across was a game in which the stated goal was to deliberately kill innocent people, with extra points for old people and children. A game like that is most definitely over the line.
And as for your preference for making a comfortable living making something you can be proud of – good for you. You’re a good example of the way in which a healthy modern business can and should be run.