Guilt-edged marketing

Scooter Libby did wrong, got caught and had his punishment cancelled by friends for whom he did a good turn. This kind of sleaze is scarcely new although in marketing terms you need look no further back than 500 years when the Catholic Church sale of indulgences peaked.

At its most bare-faced this wheeze offered remission of temporal punishment for sins committed, in return for cash. However, its main outcome was not consumer cynicism but Protestants.

Nowadays, in the UK at least, we’re a fairly godless bunch and thus two of our major atavistic needs have to be addressed differently.

First, we want answers to the big existential questions – how did the universe begin, where did we come from, where’s the nearest pub etc. In the old days (and in much of the US today it seems) we asked our priests, and they told us stuff which has turned out to be bollocks.

Second, we need something to anchor our ethics: our sense of what’s fair and right; how to decide in moral conflicts; who deserves our understanding and who we ought to hang.

Our priests have had a better track record here but even so we now turn increasingly to agony aunts and lawyers, while politicians (of all people) try to get in on the act.

Of course our need for ethics is wrapped up with our need to feel guilt and then assuage it through atonement. In the 21st century though, instead of worrying about original sin and the Ten Commandments, which are now more likely to be Reality TV formats than moral paranoia triggers, we have poverty, hunger, genocide, animal extinctions, disease and climate change to feast on.

It’s taken the marketing industry a while to catch up but they’re beginning to hit their stride, not only with Live Aid, Live Eight, Live Earth and other such narcissism, but more deeply with cause marketing.

Thus, welcome to Freetrade, Greenpeace, Carbon footprints and Organic food. In the UK hens’ eggs are classified by the amount of suffering the hens are going through to produce them. The less pain the higher the price.

So, at the secular confessional we gladly take away our punishments of tree-planting, environmental taxes, recycling, ethical stocks and free-range eggs. We know we have sinned and we need to feel the lash.

And the PR business continues to take all this further, seeking an edge from altruism everywhere. A recent PR Week article was devoted to “cultural collusion” – in which companies strip out guilt via paying money to the arts. I’d like to think the PR people were being up front about their deceit (“collusion”: secret agreement or understanding for purposes of trickery or fraud – OED), but in fact it just shows how vapid all this can be.

Bring back hell.