Aqua Pebble

Aug

5

Are we ‘Evil’ mar­ket­ing people?

August 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment

evilI asked the Inno­v­a­tive Mar­ket­ing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Inno­va­tors LinkedIn group a ques­tion and received a single-worded, thought pro­vok­ing response that inspired me to write this article.

Vic­tor Brierley’s answer to my ques­tion ‘What is the next BEST thing in mar­ket­ing?’ was ‘Hon­esty!’ This answer brought to mind the ‘evil mar­ket­ing peo­ple’ phrase I had heard non-marketing ‘peo­ple’ use.

This also brought to mind a scene from the movie ‘Minor­ity Report’ where John Ander­ton (Tom Cruise) is walk­ing through a shop­ping mall and there are adverts all around him address­ing him by name and pro­mot­ing prod­ucts based on what he, sup­pos­edly, would be inter­ested in and ‘entice’ him to buy. When I watched that, the stark real­ity of future mar­ket­ing struck me and I then devel­oped an inter­est in behav­ioural and pre­dic­tive mar­ket­ing. These fields are and have been researched both quan­ti­ta­tively and qual­i­ta­tively. I have seen inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tions on brain research into buy­ing behav­iour and future pre­dic­tions about where busi­ness and the world as whole is mov­ing (I hope to share some of these in future articles).

So why does the answer ‘Hon­esty!’ bring these to mind? I strongly believe in hon­esty and respect, yet as a mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sional, I take part in mar­ket­ing sci­ence that could be seen as ‘manip­u­la­tive’ by those on the receiv­ing end. Of course, we do every­thing to ensure it is not seen like this and por­tray our­selves as meet­ing a need. The object to meet the need ahead of our com­pe­ti­tion and make a profit for our com­pany — except non-profit. I won­der how hon­ourable our inten­tions are and can there really be hon­our in busi­ness and total ‘Hon­esty!’ in mar­ket­ing. Can we risk peo­ple mak­ing their deci­sions with­out influ­ence? I know these thoughts are con­tro­ver­sial and I would retal­i­ate at any­one who openly accused me of them, as I am a morally good per­son (or am I). At what point are we cross­ing over the eth­i­cal line?

Then there is the per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing aspect and hon­esty in adher­ing to data laws and respect­ing customer’s wishes. The num­ber of out-of-the-blue emails or mes­sages I have received that start by apol­o­giz­ing for the direct, per­sonal approach… The thing is, some of them I am glad they approached me.

Then there is hon­esty about your prod­uct and com­pany. Do you make them look more favourable (don’t we all wear masks?). I am not 100% cer­tain what Vic­tor was specif­i­cally refer­ring to or if it was a gen­er­alised ref­er­ence. It, how­ever, was thought provoking.

Vic­tor Brier­ley kindly gave me per­mis­sion to refer to him in my arti­cle. You can see his web­site and blog here. After Victor’s com­ment I con­nected with him on LinkedIn and would love to hear him expand on his answer.

I would like to hear your thoughts on how (if) we can be hon­est in marketing.

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