When they called themselves the Sales Department, they had only one job. It was selling the company’s products. Salesmen, saleswomen, and salespersons who missed their sales quotas lost their jobs.* Now that they changed their name to marketers, their job is to increase shareholder value.
Marketers Are Poisoning America’s Children
If you knew marketing people were poisoning your children, you’d probably do something about it. Well, parents, marketers are poisoning your children.
The goal of the researcher is to understand people
Since 1986, I’ve been applying my knowledge of human behavior to study people, the world’s most interesting subject. My goal has always been to use the tools and techniques I learned from the related fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology to add to my understanding of people’s wants, needs, and expectations. This is what my first sociology professor liked to call, “Vy dey do de vay dey do.”
The goal of the marketer is to convince people to buy the product
Some marketers say whatever they can get away with to sell more of their widgets.** This is especially so when their products are so awful that they can’t sell them on their merits.
Most advertising and marketing service companies tout their ability to build brand connections that increase revenue and market share
In plain English, they’re claiming their company will help you sell more of your waddaya-call ’ems.
Aristotle said one of the central questions of ethics is how to lead a good life
Most of us believe ethics are principles that define rights and wrongs, obligations, responsibilities, and dictates of conscience. Most of us agree ethics are also moral codes that govern how activities are to be conducted.
- Moral ethics regulate individual behavior
- Applied ethics is the practical part of morality, the part that decides what’s good and bad. What’s right and wrong. What’s acceptable and what’s not.
- Marketing ethics are a set of guiding principles that shape a brand’s marketing strategies and practices to build strong brand connections.
That last one strikes me as a long reach, because I haven’t been able to find anything about what building strong brand connections has to do with ethics.
What are the ethics of the marketing profession?***
The American Marketing Association devotes more than a thousand words to Marketing Ethics. Here are the ones that count:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
I’ll bet not one member in a hundred can recite that
The “society at large” bit seems boastfully self-important, too. It’s what linguists call self-aggrandizing. Why do you think they don’t mention selling?
The AMA has a formal Statement of Ethics, too
Within are these five values: honesty, responsibility, equity, transparency, and citizenship. Each of these are things that build trust. Forbes says the only people who are less trusted than marketers are lobbyists and people who sell cars. Why do you think people feel that way?
A succession of studies find that only somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of Americans trust advertising
The least trusted products are over-the-counter diet supplement products, financial services, and pharmaceuticals (before that it was cigarettes).
That means most Americans don’t trust marketers, don’t trust advertisements, and especially don’t trust over-the-counter diet supplement advertising. Yet we know that Americans are spending $200 billion a year on OTC diet supplements. Combined, these facts rate a graduate-level exam question about the obvious cognitive dissonance created by these two things that can’t both be true, can they?
Why do so many spend so much money on these products if they don’t trust the admittedly exaggerated advertising claims made by untrustworthy marketers?
Marketers like to say they seek emotional truth, whatever that is
BN Branding offers 11 tips for truth in advertising, marketing, and branding. Here are the two at the top of their list:
- Facts are far less interesting than stories.
- If you have a me-too product, you’re going to have to “bluff with fluff,” because “product parity demands an effective use of exaggeration.”
The Federal Trade Commission prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising
This would seem to mean that advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers. They must not imply things that are not true or leave out any information relevant to prospective buyers.
The Federal Trade Commission says this is the law:
“When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio, television, or anywhere else, that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”
Froot Loops
This is a sugary cereal with a silly name, along with others equally “high in nutrition,” Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, Lucky Charms, Fruity Pebbles, and if you have children, you know many more than that. Class-action suits have followed sugary cereals’ claims of being healthful and nutritious, many ending in multi-million-dollar settlements where the manufacturer and seller do not admit to any wrongdoing.
Cereal manufacturers explain away exaggerated and false claims as merely “non-actionable puffery”
When caught lying, companies have argued that they’re only engaging in permissible comedy. Venable.com has published what it modestly calls The Best Explanation and Update on Puffery You WIll Ever Read. In it, the authors say “Puffery can be a powerful marketing tool that, if used correctly, can capture the attention of consumers and garner sales.“
Some marketers say they’re only stretching the truth
Really? Stretching the truth is when you exaggerate the size of the fish you caught. Lying is when you didn’t catch anything, but say you did.
Courts sometimes find companies guilty, but more often place the blame on the consumer
Courts often rule that overclaims are so grossly exaggerated that no reasonable buyer would take them at face value. Well, now, if that’s so, why do these advertising strategies work for marketers who employ them? Why do they bother spending all those billions of dollars if they have no effect?
One court ruling said the case before it “epitomizes the exaggerated advertising, blustering, and boasting by a manufacturer upon which no consumer could reasonably rely”
Another U.S. District Judge wrote how it is up to reasonable consumers to come to their own conclusions about whether or not sugar is healthy for them. If the courts say advertising is not to be taken seriously, why do consumers?
Kids crave sugar
- Harvard Health Publishing says Americans eat more than a billion pounds of sugary cereals a year.
- The leading causes of hospitalizations for children under 18 involve weight problems and tooth decay.
Only a real knucklehead would try to dismiss those two related facts as mere coincidence
Sugary cereal marketers know that what they’re peddling makes kids less healthy, yet they continue to scheme new ways to deliberately mislead consumers.
Kids respond positively to cartoonish characters and bright colors, especially primary colors
Ergo, marketers use sugary cereal ads and boxes that feature cartoon characters, animations, and vibrant colors – all intentionally designed to attract the attention of children.
Who’s responsible for the healthiness of the sugary cereals American children eat, you ask?
“Not us,” say the courts. “Not I,” says the sugar. “Not I,” says the processed grains. “Not I,” says the package. “Not I,” says the marketer.
—
*See my favorite scene about sales here in the film Glengarry Glen Ross.
**Widgets is a placeholder, a stand-in term for unspecified products.
***The drollest one in the group liked to taunt marketers by saying “How can you violate the ethics of a profession that has none?”
Bonus
Back when cigarettes claimed they weren’t advertising to kids to get them started smoking early, there was Joe Camel. RJ Reynolds denied accusations that they were marketing to children even after the Journal of the American Medical Association published research that found, since Joe Camel arrived,
- Six-year-old children recognized the Joe Camel character as often as they recognized the Disney Channel logo.
- High school kids were more familiar with Joe Camel than adults.
- Camel’s market share rose sharply among youth smokers.
That should have made it game, set, and match
But Reynolds continued denying what was obvious to everyone else until the pressure from Federal agencies became too much to bear and their legal fees became too expensive. You’d think that’d be the end of it. But tobacco companies did the same thing again with flavored vapes, didn’t they?
Want to read more things like this? Start here.
