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Don’t Be Evil
A lesson in intent/action harmony: I have found that intentions are most effective when phrased in a positive way.
In the example above, Google’s corporate slogan is “Don’t Be Evil!” The take-away from that statement for you, the customer, is built on the underlying cultural assumption that giant corporations are soulless. Whether or not they *are* is irrelevant, as it is an accurate assessment of the typical person’s cultural associations and beliefs. Specifically, that slogan is designed to call to mind - without being overt about it - that Microsoft is “evil”, which many people indeed see it as being.
So Google, early on, set itself up as a challenger brand: announcing “what makes them different” is their “human-centric” approach. But really, what does their slogan say about their level of commitment? Are they actually committed to doing good? No, because otherwise their slogan would simply be:
Google: Do Good.
What they are actually concerned with is managing and directing people’s perceptions about what they are and what they are doing. And this is exactly what the business of search results really is: managing and directing people’s perceptions around information by controlling what they see and how they see it. But that doesn’t make a very strong corporate slogan, does it:
Google: managing and directing people’s perceptions around information by controlling what they see and how they see it
In fact, that sounds kind of creepy, right? Evil, almost? Having “evil” purposes in mind seems like a likely motivation for why you would want to have a linguistic claim ready to immediately counter that perception in the public eye. When your brand promise is something so vague and meaningless as “Don’t Be Evil” it becomes very easy to deliver successfully, as long as you can manage your brand image in such a way as you’re not seen as being allied with Satan himself.
What if they really changed their slogan to “Do Good,” though? How amazing would that be: a humongous company which publicly committed itself to the notion of “Good”, and made all of its decisions according to that criteria? The world would be a different place and Google would be a different and better company instead of the sagging giant it is quickly becoming.
Main point, as far as intent/action harmony goes: phrase your intentions in a positive manner so that you are not setting yourself up for conflicts from the start.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Exactly!
Great analysis. I studied with this charming, trickster of a hypnotist who had incurred the wrath of Mothers Against Drunk Driving because he, very passionately and seriously, told them that they were killing people with their slogan “Don’t Drink and Drive.” The whole thing about the subconscious mind not comprehending negative statements because it has to first conceive of the command to drink and drive before it can conceptualize the opposite.
I suppose he had an effect in the end because they eventually changed the MADD slogans on the highways to “Drive Sober.”
September 19th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Another thing: the “subconscious” or whatever part of the mind you want to call it - well, it doesn’t give a shit what ORDER you put words in. It just listens for the words, and cues the lights and music to match each word. Each word acts almost as a tiny symbol-movie itself, which are then strung together into cognitive chains of pearls.
What actually sticks are the keyword cluster phrases which are repeated over and over again: which is why you need to make sure you are concise and careful in word choice.
Breaking down “Don’t Be Evil” further, you get (1) “Don’t” is ignored by the subconscious as a negative command. (2) “Be” is simply an equal sign (=), and (3) all you’re left with is evil. But you’re dropping that command into the subconscious (which is the true value of negatively phrased statements - they immediately sink), and you’re ending up with a linguistic equation something like:
(ignore) = evil
Ignore that we are evil.
Google’s core brand?
September 19th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Speaking of being evil: the number of misleading assumptions and associations this forces you to make is INCREDIBLE:
http://screencast.com/t/Y2zsjAEQ
September 20th, 2007 at 2:29 am
you stole my idea. i had the exact same thought and was planning on writing about it. in fact, with the word evil in there, it calls into question whether to the brain/collective consciousness, is there any difference between:
-be evil
and
-don’t be evil
i’m not sure there is…
anyway, you are amazing and you are a biter. so we must battle.
September 20th, 2007 at 4:19 am
Yup.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Yeah, I don’t think there *is* any difference!
Challenge accepted! I was hoping it would come to this!
November 5th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
[…] My main thing is this: I make on average a reliable $200-250 per month via AdSense. I don’t want to lose that revenue, but I am hell-bent on step-by-step removing ALL of my data from Google and eliminating their ownership of my datawake. The shit they are doing is *just not right* in my estimation, whether or not it is expressly “evil.” […]
March 29th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
[…] So what potential conclusions could we apply to these simple observations? The most obvious hypothesis would be that Google is actually receiving payouts from companies to intentionally bury relevant results. Without access to large non-public sets of Google’s data, you, the information-consumer would never be able to know. The information simply wouldn’t be available - ever. And you’d just be expected to trust a company whose kitschy slogan is “Don’t be evil.” (Not surprisingly, my post entitled “Don’t be evil” was also well-buried in the site-specific index). Oh wait, and that’s exactly the position we find ourselves in now. At least we don’t have these computers hooked right into our central nervous system… yet. […]