Do brands weave or tear our social fabric?

"Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household." --Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

When we read headlines about greedy bankers destroying the lives of ordinary Americans, what we're learning is that greed makes some people indifferent to the suffering of others.  Lo and behold, this extreme indifference is actually a sin!  Apparently there used to be eight deadly sins, but along the line we forgot all about one: acedia.  Literally, it's "an ancient term signifying profound indifference and inability to care about things that matter, even to the extent that you no longer care that you can't care." 

The reason this matters to our social fabric is that acedia is contagious; as we experience indifference from others we become indifferent to others, and it spreads outward from each of us in concentric circles of alienation.  After all, if materially successful people are indifferent, shouldn't we all imitate them?

Kathleen Norris, author of Acedia and Me, would like to counteract this trend by bringing the concept itself back to life.  She sees acedia in "the plagues of contemporary society -- a toxic, nearly unbearable mix of boredom and restlessness, frantic escapism (including that of workaholism), commitment-phobia and enervating despair."

Even if you don't think it's as bad as all that, she's onto something. Though we didn't have a word for it, many of us have felt acedia's impacts acutely, and it seems particularly modern.  During the worst days of the Great Depression, my mother tells me, people reached out to their neighbors to help out.  In Haiti, today, I am astonished by the caring and resilience of a devastated people.  Yet, we very well-off modern Americans complain of isolation and emptiness. How many of us really know what our neighbors are going through?  Do we even want to care?

It's just possible that material success is one cause of our modern indifference.  If so, my own field--advertising--may be partly to blame.  By interspersing bright, funny ads with anxiety-provoking news and dramas, we may be driving people to use consumption to create a shell of indifference in response to a scary world.

Certainly, wealth doesn't have a great reputation--it's quite literally associated with selfish indifference in popular culture.  In movies and on TV, big companies are just bad; cold-hearted, scheming, and brutal. Is this just the tendency to project evil onto outsiders? Or are large corporations actually in some way bad for social bonds?  Perhaps in the past, knowing the craftsman or woman who made your product helped to cement the sense that society mattered.  Perhaps the anonymity of the large corporation devalues society itself.

Thinking back to research I've done, I'm not really sure.  In research settings I encounter some cynicism, but actually more anger or frustration.  The desire to be treated as if you matter, as if a company cares about you, is potent.  In fact, mattering to others is necessary to survival as well as emotional well-being, so we shouldn't be surprised that people are angry when companies emphasize profit over people.  
 
People do believe that corporations can care, or they wouldn't be angry when they don't. That may be why cause-related marketing is so successful; it helps us to believe that the people who sell us products are more like us, able to feel concern and warmth for others. 
 
At the same time, maintaining a sense of human connection with a company is a real stretch, on both sides of the relationship.  We humans seem to be developmentally designed to respond to people we recognize better than those we don't.  The larger the corporation, and especially the more isolated from its customers, the more vigilant it needs to be to avoid brand-killing mis-steps (like those of Toyota, or the large consumer banks). 

Brands help because they transfer the relationship to the product, which is real and present in the customer's life--so, for example, a can of Coke can be likeable, even if there is no human face to put on it.  But again, this can fall apart very quickly if the veil of the brand is pierced by bad news about the manufacturer. 

I believe the key is humanizing your brand--literally.  Giving it a face or faces will be a great help when things go wrong.  A car brand I have worked with, following safety and performance issues, has painstakingly rebuilt customer trust by inviting customers to experience content on everything from new model development to their passion for the vehicles of the past.  They make a big point of being accessible, and our research shows that doing so makes them easier to trust.

So I think the answer to the question in the title is, it's up to the brand to prioritize human trust and be creative about building it.  Social media may be the silver bullet platform, but the content will be make or break.  How open, human, and concerned are you?  Because that's the question your customers want you to answer.