Short Essay in English
FIRST PRIZE
Víctor Vu
A Sober Society: How alcohol consumption hinders Vietnam development & What can we do to protect the future
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First Prize Short Essay in English - Students
A Sober Society: How alcohol consumption hinders Vietnam development & What can we do to protect the future
Author: Víctor Vu
Master in Management
Vietnam
I. The Toxic Drinking Culture of Vietnam
II. Cheap Alcohol & Loose Regulation
Soon To Be No Import Taxes
Unrecorded Alcohol
III. Negative Externalities To The Society
a. Private Cost
b. Public Cost
c. Intangible Costs
IV. Action Plan For A Sober Society
1. Higher Taxes On All Alcoholic Beverages
2. On-trade & Off-trade Restriction
3. Social Norms Campaign
4. Tackling Unrecorded Alcohol
5. Advertising Restriction
What Can We Do As Responsible Citizens?
V. Conclusion
Appendix 1: Drinking Hub of Hanoi
Bibliography
Growing up in a country with a quarter of the population earning less than $2 a day, I always wonder what is holding us back and where we will we go in the future. While the answer to the latter is mysterious, history can help us solve the former one.
Vietnam shares one of the longest histories in the world, starting at half a million years ago, with the first settlements along the Red River Valley. Since the end of pre-dynasty tribal society in B.C 3000, Vietnam have been through 6 foreign invasions, 12 dynasties and no less than 30 wars. Vietnam’s culture was heavily shaped by Confucian ideology, a knowledge system established from a thousand years under Chinese colonization. 1887 marked the another turn in Vietnamese history, with the authoritative victory of the French over the Vietnamese, and the colonization of the last independent Vietnamese kingdoms. French rule was marked by exploitation, but also the introduction of the Romanized alphabet, and the rise of a local vernacular culture rather than one based on Chinese classics. The country ultimately gained independence on 30 of April, 1975, this marked a period of economic liberalization without political liberalization (Kiernan, 2017). In 1986, the government rolled out an economic revolution plan and opened borders to globalization. For the next 30 years, Vietnam achieved remarkable economic development with average GDP growth of 6%, moving from a poor to a lower middle income country. Market liberalization, free trade, private ownership, the normalization of political relations with the United States, and the conversion of collectively held institutions to opportunities for private profit have contributed to rapid economic growth (Lincohn, 2016).
However, statistics about economic achievement are subjected to estimations and biases, reality is often repugnant. Abnormal GDP growth widened income inequality gap. Reckless economic development formed congested cities and impoverished rural areas. Corrupted governing system hindered innovation and neglected human rights. Urbanization fueled by unskilled population led to high unemployment rate and crime rate. Consequently, increased in wealth and social openness brought along a subtle but serious socioeconomic problem, excessive consumption of alcohol. Our history was filled with blood and tears, our future is drown under alcohol.
1. The Toxic Drinking Culture of Vietnam
“A man without spirits is like a flag without wind” – A common proverb shared among drinkers to associate masculinity with drinking. Drinkers, rooted with patriarchy ideology, would classified non-drinking male as homosexual. While male suffers the direct costs of alcohol consumptions, women suffers social harms from intoxicated male partners.
It is uncommon to see a party without alcohol. Alcoholic beverages – beer, rice wine, liquor, and other intoxicants – are consumed during traditional festivals such as the Lunar New Year; they also mark rites of passage such as weddings, housewarmings, funerals, and death anniversaries. The purposes of drinking are diverse. People drink to celebrate, to condole, to socialize, to brag, to do business, or to get drunk. Not drinking at a party is a sign of disrespect and lack of hospitality. Party goer would drink excessively at rapid pace as it is the norm for people on the same table to finish a round of drink at the same time, they often go “bottom up”. People have such a strong appetite for alcohol that they are willing to sacrifice their health and much else for the sake of continued heavy drinking.
Eventually, drinking become a competition in which heavy drinkers earn peer’s respects. As a result, the goal of every drinker is to get the others intoxicated. Peer pressure plays as the major psychologic factor pulling young people to alcohol consumption. Although the legal drinking age is 18, it is socially acceptable for kids to drink at age 15. By the age of 25, there is no longer need for peer pressure, drinking has become a habit. Even worse, non-drinker faces the risk of social exclusion as drinking is one of the very few ways to socialize among young people.
Figure 1: Sales of Alcoholic Drinks from 2002 – 2021 in million litres (Euromonitor, 2017)
The Vietnamese are among the heaviest drinkers in Southeast Asia. A WHO study, in 2014, found average per capita consumption for adults almost doubled from 2003–2005 to 2008– 2010, increasing from 3.8 to 6.6 liters of pure alcohol. This rate is higher than the global rate of 6.2 liters per capita. Euromonitor reported that beer demand has increased by more than 300 percent since 2002. However, all these estimates might substantially underestimated the total consumption figure due to the sizable market share of unrecorded alcohol, which accounts up to 70% of total consumption.
II. Cheap Alcohol & Loose Regulation
A litter of homebrew spirit costs no more than 20,000 Dong or €0.6, while a pin of gas beer at any street restaurants costs 5,000 Dong or €0.15. You could get drunk with less than a euro. While domestic produced alcohol is subjected to Special Consumption Tax (SCT) and Sales Tax (VAT), Imported alcohol further subjected to import taxes. As of 1 January 2018, the SCT for alcoholic drinks of 20% ABV and over is 65%. For wine and spirits below 20% ABV, the SCT rate is 35%. These rates have been marginally increased in the past few years. Sales tax in Vietnam is 10% for all alcoholic drinks and has been kept constant throughout.
Unfortunately, regulations without effective enforcement created loophole for opportunistic merchants. To evade taxes, smugglers create black market filled by illegally imported branded spirits from neighboring countries that have lower alcohol taxes. A report from Euromonitor estimated that 80-90% of spirits sold in Vietnam are contraband, since spirits offer the highest profit to smugglers. The prices of contraband spirits smuggled from China and Cambodia are usually 30-50% lower than the prices charged in official outlets. High import tax and special consumption tax will continue to worsen this situation.
Soon To Be No Import Taxes
From 2006, under an integration program with AFTA - Asian Free Trade Area, import tax rates on all alcoholic drinks originating from AFTA members were reduced to 5%, from the previous level of 100%. When Vietnam officially joined the WTO in January 2007, the Vietnamese government committed to cutting the tax levy on imported beer, wine and spirit by half in 2012 (Euromonitor, 2017). Worse, under the TPP Agreement with 12 other members, import taxes imposed on alcoholic drinks will be eliminated in 2026 and 2027. Ultimately, this is the cost for being a developing country in a globalized market.
Unrecorded Alcohol
According to the World Health Organization’s 2014 Global Status Report on Alcohol, unrecorded alcohol makes up 70% of total consumption in Vietnam. Firstly, local brewed alcohol is easy to obtain due to fewer restrictions on where or when it can be purchased. Secondly, Vietnamese prefer to drink traditional beverage. Most importantly, it is cheap, with nearly 50% of drinkers reporting the much lower price of homemade alcohol as an important reason for its consumption (IARD, 2018). As this segment of the alcohol market is largely unregulated, control measures like pricing, taxation, and restrictions on the availability of recorded alcohol beverages are of little use because they do not affect the production, sale, or consumption of unrecorded alcohol. Figure 2 illustrate the gigantic market share of unrecorded alcohol compare to recorded alcohol.
Figure 2 Alcohol Market Share in Vietnam (IARD, 2018)
III. Negative Externalities To The Society
Alcohol consumption can have both health and social consequences for the drinker. The harmful use of alcohol can also result in harm to other individuals, such as family members, friends, co-workers and strangers. Moreover, the harmful use of alcohol results in a significant health, social and economic burden on society at large. Estimates of the economic burden of alcohol use are $224 billion per year, which composes of private cost and costs to the wider society (Maclean, 2013). Another research shows that the economic burden of alcohol on society is substantial, costs attributable to alcohol represent from 1.3% to 3.3% of the GDP of a country (Rehm et al., 2009a).
a. Private Cost
Alcohol is typically a valued commodity, which means that drinking usually uses resources which would otherwise be available for other purposes. Where earnings are low, heavy drinking may further impoverish the drinker, the drinker’s family, or a whole community, thus increasing health or social harm (Schmidt et al., 2010; De Silva et al., 2011).
According to the National Wage Council of Vietnam, the average income of factory worker is around €120 a month (Hung, 2015). A heavy drinker in Vietnam has a drinking budget of roughly €30, which is 25% of the disposable income. The lower one income, the larger proportion of that income being spent on alcohol, and the longer one trap in the poverty cycle. A report from WHO highlights that individual drinkers will incur socioeconomic problems such as loss of earnings, lower productivity, unemployment, family problems, and especially increased healthcare costs. Alcohol accounted for 5.9% of all deaths and 5.1 % of the global burden of disease and injury in 2012. These figures translate into 3.3 million alcoholattributable deaths.
Figure 3 Alcohol Attributed Deaths (WHO,2014)
The most common mean of transportation in Vietnam is motorbike. Motorbike accidents are much deadlier than car accidents as riders are fully exposed to the surrounding environment. Under the influence of alcohol, drinkers are prone to rule breaking behaviours such as speeding, not wearing helmet and reckless driving behaviours. A report from the medical council of Vietnam revealed that out of 21,500 traffic accidents in 2016, 9,000 riders have high alcohol blood content (Loan and Viet, 2017). Worse, this estimation has not account for unrecorded traffic accidents in rural areas, which are more prone to excessive alcohol consumption.
b. Public Cost
When private consumption generates more external costs than private costs, negative externality arises. In term of alcohol use, particularly excessive use, negative externalities include traumatic injury and property damage from accidents, increased utilization of health care, lowered productivity in the labor market, criminal victimization, domestic violence, unwanted sexual encounters and venereal diseases, and hangover. Under the influence of alcohol, a parent may be provoked to strike an irritating child; soccer fans may riot in response to an unsatisfactory outcome; a college student may forcefully insist on having sex with his date; friends may escalate an argument into a bloody fight; a robbery victim may foolishly attempt resistance in the face of a loaded gun. These problems are common among drinkers as alcohol consumption decreases cognitive abilities and increases risky behaviours (Rehm et al., 2012).
A distinctive characteristic of negative externality is that the private party who enjoys the benefit does not bear the full societal costs. In the case of alcohol-related traffic motor vehicle accidents, the outcome for which the costs to society are particularly high, yet much costs created by intoxicated drivers are borne by victims. He pays the price of purchasing the alcohol, and any injuries and resulting lost work that he sustains. If caught and convicted he will pay some portion of the victims’ costs. In Vietnam, a country held back by bureaucratic inefficiency and political apathy, injustice fuels the magnitude of negative externalities.
Figure 4 Conceptial Casual Model of Alcohol Consumption & Health Outcomes (WHO, 2014)
c. Intangible Costs
While private costs and public costs could be calculated and estimated, a third category, which is poorly measured and for which the practice of adding estimates is disputable, is intangible costs. Intangible costs are the costs assigned to pain and suffering, and more generally to a diminished quality of life. Such intangible costs are borne by the drinkers, as well as their families and potentially by other individuals linked to the drinker (Anderson et al., 2006; Thavorncharoensap et al., 2009). Intoxication, dependence or alcohol withdrawal states can result in poor performance in major social roles – in functioning at work, in parenting, in relationship and friendship roles. This in turn can result in harm to physical or mental health, caused by the role functioning impairment itself, others’ reactions to the impairment, or both (Schmidt et al., 2010).
IV. Action Plan For A Sober Society
1. Higher Taxes On All Alcoholic Beverages
One strategy to reduce negative externalities is to increase the cost of drinking. The law of demand tells us that when the price of a good increases, individuals will consume less of this good. Indeed, several research have concluded the negative correlation of monetary price of alcohol and alcohol consumption. Drinkers with high price sensitivity such as student react the most when faced higher drinking costs. Alcohol is a commodity with inelastic demand, thus a change in price will lead to a smaller change in demand (Selvanathan, 2017). Therefore, from an economic point of view, government should impose higher tax on alcohol. Even though demand for alcohol will fall at a lesser rate than the increase in price, the increase in government tax revenues could be allocated for other alcohol cutback programs.
Product with inelastic demand indicates that price will not matter much to those who have become addicted. In response to a general price increase for alcoholic beverages, alcoholics without much income could preserve their habit by seeking cheaper sources of ethanol: drinking off premises rather than in bars, or buying fortified wine instead of table wine. In the case of Vietnam, majority of heavy drinkers are low income earners in rural areas, thus higher costs of alcoholic beverage might lead to the expansion of unregulated alcohol market. However, and despite these plausible speculations, the evidence is clear that alcoholic beverages do obey the economists’ dictum after all: An increase in price results in reduced consumption, not only of the volume of beverage but also of ethanol (Cook and Moore, 2002). Further government intervention may be warranted to protect low income earners and avoid expansion of unregulated market.
In order to determine the appropriate level of taxation placed on each alcoholic beverage, the demand elasticities are used as key inputs. Consequently, obtaining estimates of demand elasticities is of crucial importance for taxation purposes at the micro and macro level of the economy. Additionally, it is only fair that drinkers should compensate the public for the external costs of their choices. If alcohol prices do not reflect the full social costs of consumption, including the external costs, then consumers will drink too much, in the technical sense that at the margin their drinks will be worth less to them than they cost (Cook and Moore, 2002). In other words, alcohol tax should eradicate the spillover cost to society created by private party.
2. On-trade & Off-trade Restriction
Much of the drinking that leads to drunk driving occurs on-premises, at bars, clubs, and restaurants. There are no defined operating hours for the sale of alcoholic drinks in off-trade outlets, and consumers can buy these products during outlets’ regular opening hours. Ontrade outlets are banned from operating between 24.00 hrs and 08.00 hrs. Only bars in tourist accommodation rated three stars or higher are permitted to operate after 24.00 hrs, but no later than 02.00 hrs (Euromonitor, 2017). However, reality is far from policy. Any restaurant serving alcohol enjoys high profit margin, and thus afford to lobby the regulators. Restaurants in big cities would typically open until 4:00 hrs on a busy day. As a personal experience, pubs and bars in Hanoi’s tourist hotspot have to close at 24:00 hrs, so street vendors would move all the tables on the sidewalk in-house at 23:55 hrs. After the police check at 00:15 hrs, business would roll on as normal (Appendix 1 shows the crowded atmosphere at Hanoi drinking hub).
There need to be firm and consistent policy enforcement campaigns to temper the supply side of alcohol. Trade outlet owners are especially sensitive to regulatory fines that would cut profit margin. Thus, increase fines could be an option constrain restaurants’ operating hours. Another strategy is the enforcement of responsible service training and policies denying alcohol service to those who are already intoxicated or underage. Assessments have generally shown that training in itself has little effect on behaviour of servers. However, clear positive effects have been noted on indicators such as rates of customer intoxication when server training and policies are backed up by active enforcement, including evidence of reduced drink-driving casualties and violence. A related strategy with promising results is to combine server training with training of pub staff as a means of reducing violence in and around the premises (Room, Babor and Rehm, 2005).
In parallel, government should regulate opening hours of off-trade outlets, where consumer purchases alcohol to consume in-house. The risk of alcoholic intoxication is typically higher for in-house consumption. Therefore, alcohol sale should be halted at 24:00 hrs. Additionally, it should be restricted to supply beverages with alcoholic contents to underage consumers or consumers with signs of intoxication. It is important to note that alcohol consumption after 24:00 hrs often results in low rationality and risky behaviours. To protect society benefits, it is equally important to tackle alcohol market from both demand side and supply side.
3. Social Norms Campaign
Since peer pressure has an important implication on alcohol consumption, social norms campaigns that aim to alter attitude and perceptions of drinkers could be a promising strategy reduce alcohol consumption among young people. Social norms campaigns should highlight not only how much students actually drink but also how much their fellow students disapprove of alcohol abuse. A research from Paek and Hove showed that social norms campaign is more effective than educational programs in tackling excessive alcohol consumption among students.
The most effective way to deter underage students from drinking would be to combine efforts to counter various types of alcohol promotions with a variety of policy approaches, such as strict campus alcohol control policies, consistent community enforcement of proof-of-age identification, and consistent police enforcement of underage drinking laws. Good enforcement of minimum legal drinking will increase the difficulty with which underage drinkers face when attempting to purchase alcohol. They must spend time to find someone of age to purchase the alcohol or acquiring a fake ID. Also, given the strong effect of reward motives on underage drinking, it’s important to inform students about activities other than drinking that would enable them to relax and socialize with peers (Paek and Hove, 2012).
4. Tackling Unrecorded Alcohol
Empirical evidence have shown mixed effects of increase in alcohol taxes. During World War 1, Russia and Great Britain were greatly concerned about alcohol consumption, as they feared that drunkenness may hamper the war efforts. For example, Russia outlawed the sale of vodka and the British government restricted the availability of alcohol by imposing restrictions on the Public Houses opening times and increased alcohol, which increased to five times what it was before the war. Due to these restrictions in the UK from 1914 to 1918, total alcohol consumption fell from 89 million gallons to 37 million gallons and the number of convictions of being drunk in London fell from 67,103 in 1914 to 16,567 persons in 1918 (Selvanathan, 2017).
However, a similar attempt by the Russian government to control alcohol sales ended up in failure as people started producing their own alcohol which resulted in only the reduction of the government’s tax revenue. In other to avoid Russia’s flop, there should be a comprehensive strategy aimed at unrecorded alcohol includes educating consumers of unrecorded beverages and changing attitudes and perceptions. Successful interventions are those that include bringing the production and sale of traditional beverages into the regulatory environment, involving communities where unrecorded consumption is most prevalent, and changing social norms around its role in society. Additionally, there need to be strict border control to temper the inflow of contraband alcohols. Regulators should do frequent check of outlets that offer spirits to provide prove of source and impose high fines on distributer of contraband spirits.
5. Advertising Restriction
According to the Institute of Strategic and Health Policies, alcohol ranks fourth of eight factors which carry the highest health risk in Vietnam, and is also the main cause of domestic violence and traffic accidents. Thus, in accordance with the Law on Advertisements, which came into effect in January 2013, advertising is prohibited for alcoholic drinks with an ABV of 15% or higher. Meanwhile, there is still no ban on beer advertisements.
Unfortunately, the law is not strictly implemented. Players in spirits and wine advertise their products through on-trade establishments such as bars and restaurants. Commercial posters and promotional girls are common practices used to attract consumers in restaurants. Meanwhile, wine traders take advantage of advertising posters in retail outlets, as well as wine-tasting events. (Euromonitor, 2017)
Advertisement plays as an dangerous incentive to alcohol consumption because it is relatively easier to promote rewarding and hedonic behaviors than to influence people to abandon them. It is recommended that advertising is prohibited for all beverages with alcohol consumptions to temper the accelerated increase in alcohol supply. Rigorous fines should be given to business that fail to comply with the regulations. Along with strict policy, the government need to actively control the enforcement strategy, thus maintaining the momentum of the campaign. It is essential to educate alcohol suppliers the rationale of the policy as to protect the wellbeing of the society.
What Can We Do As Responsible Citizens?
A vital economic concept that alcohol drinkers need to grasp is diminishing marginal utility. The first drink will typically generate the highest marginal benefits in term of satisfaction, thirst relieve, and enjoyment. However, as the number of drinks consumed increases, the marginal benefit from each additional drink decreases. Drinker will not enjoy similar satisfaction level as the first drink. At the “turning point”, the increase in alcohol consume will generate negative marginal returns when drinkers feel intoxicated, lose cognitive control, impose health damage and show risky behaviours. This concept is important as drinkers will generate negative externalities to society when their consumption level reach to the level of negative marginal returns.
“Turning Point” - Graph 1: Diminishing Marginal Returns of Alcohol
It is important for alcohol drinkers and non – drinkers to realize their personal “turning point” and act responsibly to restrict oneself from crossing to the negative marginal returns zone. As a society, we have to come to a realization that excessive alcohol consumption diminish the quality of our life and the lives of others. We have to acknowledge that imprudent cultural norms and social pressures are among the key drivers of alcohol consumption. From these realizations, every one of us need to question our belief of what is right and wrong, and act in consistent with what we believe is optimal for the wellbeing of the society. For shop owners and direct suppliers of alcoholic beverages, obsession with short term gains cloud them from the long term sustainable development. As responsible business owners, it is important for us to understanding and comply with government regulations on alcohol restriction. These policies do not aim to eradicate alcohol from the market but to restrict excessive alcohol consumption, which are extremely costly to society. There need to be cooperative actions from both demand side and supply side to uplift this intoxicated society.
V. Conclusion
How remarkable is it for a small country suffered thousand years of warfare and colonization to be among the fastest growing economy? How upsetting is it for such a promising economy to be among nations with highest rate of alcohol consumption and traffic accidents?
Imprudent social norms, cheap alcohol, and unregulated market are among the key drivers of Vietnam’s toxic drinking culture. Drinkers suffered from private cost of rising health expenses and financial burden, while society suffered from spillover costs of traffic accidents, low productivity, violence behaviours and rising public expenses. To eradicate the issue, strict regulations and active enforcement campaign are recommended. Specifically, tax increase should be accompanied by other alcohol control policies such as restricting youth access, refusing sales to intoxicated persons, restricting advertising, and targeting drinkdriving, making it difficult to disaggregate the effect of each policy. Social campaigns are especially useful to reshape the young’s perception of alcohol consumption, while education programs have proved to be effective to reduce the consumption of unrecorded alcohol.
Actions from the authority alone would not solve the problem, every consumer and supplier of alcohol need act responsibly in respect to the wellbeing of oneself and of the surrounding community. This country was built with blood and tears, let us not drown our future under alcohol.
Appendix 1: Drinking Hub of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
Bibliography
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Third Prize Short Essay in English - Students
The Ethical lmplications of Experience Design
Author: Laura McDermott
Master in Customer Experience and Innovation
Ireland
Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology.
Experience design, in its essence, is ethically questionable because it uses an understanding of human behaviour to affect an individual’s experience. In ethics, libertarian paternalism assumes that we as humans are imperfect beings and prone to ill judgement, over optimism and ignorance on certain topics. Thus, we need external parties to help guide us in the right direction without taking away our freedom of choice. It is easier to apply the concept to a system like the welfare state, since its function is to look after the interests of its people. However, applying libertarian paternalism to traditional business, whose objectives focus not on the welfare of the customer but instead on optimising financial performance, appears more complex. This essay will reflect on the ethics of designing customer experience (CX) in business, as well as how it affects us as CX professionals.
ESTABLISHING THE FUNDAMENTALS
Today consumers want experiences as opposed to merely service offerings. In response, businesses are shifting towards an experience economy, whereby they:
Intentionally use services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.
Nespresso Boutiques are a prime example of experience design at work. The company took the sale of coffee capsules from being transactional to experiential by modelling their stores on coffee shops. Customers enter and can enjoy a cup of coffee at the well-designed Nespresso Boutique, engaging in a memorable event while also conducting their purchase.7 Enthusiasts may use colourful adjectives to describe experience design, but we must be clear about why companies are shifting towards this model; enjoyable customer experiences are proven to have commercial benefits for business. Speaking about the shift towards an experience economy, Pine and Gilmore warn that
Unless companies want to be in a commoditized business…they will be compelled to upgrade their offerings to the next stage of economic value.
THE PLAYING FIELD
Companies have access to one-of-a-kind datasets, specific settings with which to test interventions, and access to large populations of people working toward the same goal.
CX professionals working in business have an array of tools at their disposal, those mentioned above account for just a few. With industry experts predicting and promoting the use of machine learning, we become yet another step closer to understanding exactly how to affect the customer based on their personality, context and timing.
We can think of machine learning as the next step in unlocking a “behaviour genome.” By factoring in personality traits, situational features, and timing, we can better persuade people…
On reflection of the tools and power CX professionals have at their disposal, we might easily confuse our modern world for an Orwellian dystopia. The average customer, on the other hand, might be savvy to business/marketing techniques and have freedom of choice, at best.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CX DESIGNERS
Designers have power over other people and must exercise that power in an ethical fashion.
With such tools and capabilities at our disposal, we must consciously consider how we intend on using them. On one hand, the value created by a great experience could benefit both the customer and business equally; in the sense that business objectives would be met while the customer fulfilled their needs in an enjoyable and transparent way. On the other hand, companies could exploit its resources and manipulate the behaviour of the customer into buying something that they later realise is useless, or perhaps even dangerous. In relation to the design of interactive systems, Benyon, Turner and Turner argue that:
Fundamentally, ethical design is needed because the systems that are produced should be easy and enjoyable to use, as they affect the quality of people's lives.
Before discussing challenges and approaches to ethical experience design, there is something that we must acknowledge. Every CX professional is ultimately an individual with his or her own inclinations and preferences, and is also prone to bad judgement. Although we have the knowledge and understanding of ethics, we may still fail to use our tools for the better.
However, lets assume that as CX professionals we will use our resources and skills for the better, and perhaps even adopt a paternalistic approach in business. One of our fundamental objectives might be to ensure that shared value is created between the customer and business; that is, generating economic value in a way that also produces value for society by addressing its challenges. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but particularly through designing experiences transparently, and challenging tradition.
Transparency
Being human-centred also ensure(s) that designers are truthful and open in their design practice. Now that it is so easy to collect data surreptitiously and to use that data for purpose other than what it was intended for, designers need to be ever more vigilant.
Our duty as ethically minded CX professionals is to bring a human element to business. Rather than employing clever techniques or using personalised persuasion tactics to impact financial performance, we can harness our knowledge of people to communicate with their “system two” level of thinking. A prime example of this approach can be seen in Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign on Black Friday 2011. The company targeted the crisis of overconsumption by creating a disruptive campaign during one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The campaign discussed the effects of overconsumption and waste, as well as providing information about the quantity of resources required to produce the featured jacket. By doing so they engaged the rational minds of their customers, prompting them to consider the effect the Black Friday shopping experience has on the planet. A traditional approach might have been to use the adjustment and anchoring heuristic to steer customers towards “bargains”.
Challenging Tradition
Traditional companies might equate ethics to regulation or compliance. However, one of our duties is to challenge this misconception and bring pure ethics to the discussion. Behavioural Scientist recently published The Behavioral Scientist’s Ethics Checklist as a framework from which to approach questionable business choices. As CX professionals, we might tailor this approach by using storytelling techniques.
Story is less direct, more gracious, and prompts less resistance. A roomful of stubborn executives locked in an impasse can be a dangerous place for a truth teller - unless you know how to tell a good story.
Consider a company that wants to hyper-personalise the supermarket experience, but confronts GDPR obstacles. The traditionally minded CEO encourages her staff to find regulatory loopholes, because hyperpersonalisation will lead to a better experience, higher footfall and inevitably more revenue. As an ethical CX professional, we could humanise the scenario by using the CEO’s grandmother (Betty) as the persona in this hyper-personalised experience. By telling the story of how Betty feels threatened by the constant and scarily accurate messages she receives on her walk to the shop, as well as the prompts she receives to buy certain products in-store, the “persona” becomes human. The experience design proposal then turns from being an awkward regulatory issue to an ethical issue affecting someone we hold dearly. What we have done is harness our intrinsic CX skills to present Betty, as opposed to the number, and thus nudge the CEO towards rethinking her brief.
It seems that there is a lot of “catching up” in today’s society. Innovation is flourishing, new industries are being created overnight, and we can now acquire vast amounts of data and resources in a matter of clicks. With these rapid movements, ethics can become an after-thought. A case in point is the GDPR, which has taken two years to develop and will only come into effect from 2018, after countless data-protection scandals. From this we can conclude that many companies race to get ahead in the market, only adjusting their approach when regulation forces them to do so. However, a new generation of CX professionals marks a great opportunity for change. Equipped with an understanding not only of human behaviour but also of ethics, we have the opportunity to incorporate good-practice from the very first moment of experience design. If this approach is adopted at scale, we could create a society that not only demands shared value, but also fosters a paternalistic approach towards the world as a whole.
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