Over the River

August 31st, 2007

Do your part to stamp out hubris

Posted by gpc in Social Media

I’m working on some new business at work these days and part of that has meant reading a bunch of blogs that wouldn’t have read otherwise. One of them was The Dozen Blog by Julie Fleischer at Egg Strategy.

She wrote a post on BP and the obvious disconnect between their marketing message “Beyond Petroleum” and their behavior:


So what does BP do? They advertise Beyond Petroleum at the same time as the petition for - and receive - permission to dump 54% more ammonia and 35% more suspended solids into Lake Michigan…the lake, by the way, that my children swim in!!!!

Another example that has bothered me for a while is True.com. I’ve worked with a couple of online dating companies so paid attention to this market more than I would otherwise. True has consistently gone out with one set of messages seeming aimed at women - around safe dating, background checks, lobbying for legislation to require background checks - while at the same time running provocative ads on Web sites likely to be visited by men.

Do companies think everyone is blind or stupid or that we just don’t care? The degree of hubris out there is way too high and more and more of us have the opportunity to point out the disconnect between words and deed - and the attitude that it doesn’t matter - that these examples represent.

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  1. on September 28th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

    […] We also need to be completely transparent about who we are and with whom we are working. Hubris can also be a problem. We can’t treat social media or citizen journalism as a place to say […]

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