Self-Righteousness: the bold new Sales technique!

Part 1 of some thoughts on the profoundly important issue of Customer Value

This is about what, to me, is a gob-smacking outcome, an unbelievable turn of events, a piece of stark stupidity. I refer to the attempts, by some companies, to sell Faux Virtue.

A conspicuous example of the trend has been the termination of service by a UK bank to a customer on the basis that the bank did not share some of the customer’s entirely lawful political opinions. I refer, of course, to the Coutts Bank (part of NatWest Group) versus Nigel Farage debacle which, at the time of writing, has led to the resignation of the NatWest chief executive, Dame Alison Rose, and Coutts chief executive, Peter Flavel.

The trouble is, the issue is not limited to this one business. In various ways and to various extents the oleaginous tentacles of faux virtue and piety and self-righteousness have slithered into many businesses. Usually, it seems, via the HR department. Frequently to the accompaniment of the incantatory initialisms E.S.G. and D.E.I. And increasingly augmented by a Marketing and Advertising community that seems to revel in the power-grabbing notion of influencing broad societal change. (Marketing has always played a role in societal change directly resulting from the products and services it creates and promotes but, now, it is trying to move into a much broader role. More about this follows and will be expanded upon in a follow-up post in the near future.)

To set the scene …

In several previous posts I have tried to illumine, for myself as much as anyone else, the currents of change that have influenced Business, to try to better understand how we have got to where we are today. These efforts have of necessity roamed around big issues: tech breakthroughs, socio-moral shifts, and the censorship urges that seem always to accompany them. So, big, broad issues.

But, this time, I’m back in my own back yard - the world of Customer Value. It’s a fascinating area of investigation, and so basic as to be of universal interest and application. After all, Marketing, Selling and Advertising have as much to do with getting to go on a date, or deciding where to go on holiday, or on that evening out, as they do with selling billions of bottles of soda water or millions of a particular automobile or insurance policy. And it’s all accessed by asking two deceptively simple questions:

• What does a company sell?

• What do its customers buy?

The evolution of Customer Value

Here, I suggest, are the successive evolutionary modes of Customer Value:

1. VALUE IN EXCHANGE. Company sells Production. Customer buys Product. This arose with the Industrial Revolution and still operates in many situations today.

2. VALUE IN USE. Company sells Product Plus Added Value. Customer buys Productivity. This emerged when the sophistication of manufacturing and marketing enabled an ever-increasing amount of added value components.

3. VALUE IN OUTCOME. Company sells Promise. Customer buys Promise. This became possible only when our industrial capabilities were quite mature and augmented by the capabilities of digital tech.
   

   So far, so good and, at Mode 3, for the first time, Customer Value became clearly identifiable as a subjective judgement by the Customer - which is to say, Value, like Beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Plus, in the Mode 3 formulation, what is sold and what is bought came into alignment for the first time - a Promised Outcome in each case.
   
   But now, at Mode 4, something astonishingly different is being attempted: something entirely opportunistic on the part of corporations, enabled by an attempted shift to global governance that operated outside traditional territorial bounds and went largely unchecked for quite some time …
   

4. VALUE IN SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS. Company sells Faux Virtue. Customer buys Piety, Rightness.

In the near future I will expand on these four modes with examples but, here, let’s just consider Mode 4.

“We only want you as a customer if you are right-thinking.”

It’s all about a trend for companies to attempt to increase their power by moving into the social and political arenas. And they are doing so through a reliance on the least savoury of the influences of digital communication - the tendency to separate people into echo chambers and accentuate our tribal tendencies.

This can only work if there is an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group’, an ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’. Which means dressing it all up in faux virtue: businesses presenting themselves as virtuous so that ‘the right customers’ can feel pious and self-righteous when they make ‘the right choices’.

It’s a dangerous game, very different from the way Business functioned right up to this point: so much so that is a potential threat to our basic systems and political and social stability. American entrepreneur, author and aspirant politician, Vivek Ramaswamy, puts the point succinctly:

On its face, the idea that corporations shouldn’t just make products and provide services for profit but should also address other social and cultural issues sounds pretty benign. But on deeper inspection, it demands that we blur the lines between our two most fundamental institutions: capitalism and democracy. It demands that companies concern themselves with the moral questions that America is supposed to adjudicate through its democracy - racial justice, gender equality, whether and how to fight climate change. And in doing so, it gives capitalist leaders an outsized role in our democracy.¹

Let’s test this in context with the Coutts/Natwest attempt to ‘cancel’ Nigel Farage (NF). To try to justify their actions, the bank team created a 40-page dossier. Here is just one snippet from that document:

Given NF’s high profile and the substantial amount of adverse press connected to him, there are significant reputational risks to the bank in being associated with him. While it is accepted that no criminal convictions have resulted, commentary and behaviours that do not align to the bank’s purpose and values have been demonstrated.

From just this one paragraph you get a sampling of the style and tone of the whole thing, plus the whole sales pitch of selling via self-righteousness. Note the absolute partiality of “the substantial amount of adverse press connected to him”. What about the favourable press that NF enjoys? And note the disdain for “commentary and behaviours that do not align to the bank’s purpose and values.” Gosh. So what is it that NF was not ‘aligning’ with. Here are extracts from the Natwest Group website. First, what is the bank’s purpose?

Our purpose-led strategy aims to deliver sustainable, long-term business performance by creating greater value for our stakeholders. As a relationship bank for a digital world, we champion our customers’ potential by supporting them at every stage of their lives. With this approach, our purpose will create longer-term and deeper relationships with our customers, helping them, our communities and the economy to thrive.

Hmm, sounds fairly anodyne … but also strikes me as meaningless management-speak of a fairly vomit-inducing kind, but fairly harmless. So what about their values?

We work together to achieve great things with our colleagues, communities and customers. We celebrate and respect everyone's strengths and differences and share our knowledge and experiences. [My emphasis]

Wow! Faux virtue openly on display. Don’t you just love that “We celebrate and respect everyone’s strengths and differences …”? In light of the dossier and their attempted actions they should surely augment this text to read ‘We celebrate and respect everyone’s strengths and differences provided they agree with us …’

I’ll continue this topic in a follow-up post coming very soon.

Thanks for reading.

Image: Shutterstock

1. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. Inside the Social Justice Scam (2021)