- Introduction
Acquiring a new customer to buy your products costs 10 times more than convincing a loyal customer. It is a simple law, written and calculated by many marketing experts. Then why do some businesses rather concentrate on short-term benefits, and use unethical ways to generate more money? It can’t be worth it, right?
In this article, we will explain this behavior. Also, we will give you a clear analysis of why you should concentrate on introducing ethical marketing to your marketing strategy.
- The rise of unethical trends in digital marketing
“Facebook is free and it always will be.” This is a famous quote that almost everybody recognizes. This is the phrase Facebook has stated and has displayed on their registration subpage. Yes, and no. It is generally free because you don’t have to pay money to Facebook to use their platform. Instead, they used other techniques to grab some bucks.
In the 2010s, Facebook signed an agreement with Cambridge Analytics. This British consulting firm gathered information from 70 million Facebook users, which they sold to political parties to create more precise political messages. There was one simple mistake that Facebook unfortunately didn’t care about; they forgot to ask their users about this data collection.
Therefore Facebook was fined 5 billion dollars in 2019 and lost some of its reputation.
That was one real-life example of a story that happens day to day, with even the biggest companies. In today’s world, many actors look at all of our moves, and financial situations with binoculars. Businesses feel like they can’t share negative results, as their investors, suppliers, or even their buyers turn them off, and find themselves in even bigger trouble.
That’s why they choose unethical strategies to boost their sales, profits, or popularity in the short term. They never wanted to work unethically. They all started with ambitious plans and high hopes. But one little curve to the world of darkness creates irreversible scenarios.
- What is ethical marketing?
Ethical marketing is not just a strategy. It is a life-long commitment. A commitment that consists of 4 general principles: honesty, responsibility, respect for human dignity, and respect for individual rights.
- Honesty, for always publishing the truth, and not what others want to hear.
- Responsibility, for always being responsible for your own choices and decisions, and not hiding it under external circumstances.
- Respect for human dignity, for always striving to convince customers in a fair way, without any manipulation and lies.
- Respect for individual rights, avoiding discrimination, and protecting your customers’ data in both the offline and the online atmosphere.
- What makes a company “ethical”?
It is very hard to define where we draw the line about a company’s ethics. Different types of societies have different concepts about this subject. A Swedish citizen may connect sustainability with ethical marketing, while a South American customer is not willing to pay more for a product, because it is more green.
However, we may have different views of what is ethical to do, and what is not, but most of us agree on certain points.
- Avoid misleading your corporate stakeholders!
Confessing is always better than lying. If you are late with a deadline, do not try to blame the other circumstances. Make transparent reports, check your data’s reliability, and ensure to fulfill all orders. Do not always act like what the other actor wants to hear, rather say what the data show.
Also, do not try to fool your buyers with fake reviews, urge them with push messages, or sell them bad-quality products.
This is a crucial aspect of ethical marketing: some of these decisions not only harm the future cooperation between the two of you but lead to legal actions against your company. Elizabeth Holmes and Bankman-Fried are both in jail because they tend to concentrate more on short-term success and fame, than ethical behavior.
- Stick with your core values
The Volkswagen 2015 emission scandal really surprised the whole world. And not just the whole mechanism, how they programmed their cars to succeed in the tests and get their license even though the cars produced 40× more CO2 emissions than they communicated. Rather people felt that they were betrayed. They couldn’t understand how a company totally dismissed their values, their goals, just for the short-term benefits.
Ethical marketing helps you to appreciate your core values and does not let you act differently.
- Advertise with respect
Your ads should always work in synergy with your values, and your statements. One funny joke doesn’t worth that much to lose one part of your buyers. In a world, where humans can be finally proud of their race, origin, and gender, one troubled joke can endanger your sales. It is just one side of the table, what you, an outsider, think of a certain problem.
Always strive for testing your ads before they become public, as from that time nothing will delete that mistake from the internet. Please, don’t take marketing lessons from Balenciaga!
- Ethical marketing in action
Being transparent is a profitable choice. A statistic points out that 63% of consumers prefer to purchase from companies that reflect their personal values and beliefs. Therefore, in order to have a successful business in the long run, you need to focus on ethical marketing.
However, as time flies, and your organization becomes bigger and bigger, unethical behavior – even indirectly – can start to control the business.
- Awareness phase
Here, your main task is to check your whole company and find the unethical aspects.
- Planning phase
Here, you must create the solutions. It is important to make a complete analysis of what will happen, and group enough money to solve the problems accordingly. Create crisis plans, and use them if something works out a little bit differently from what you imagined.
- Action phase
It is where you establish the acts that you stated before. If your neglected part was sustainability, establish your best idea to make this problem vanish. For example, create green packaging. If you have problems with transparency, share your results with your buyers from time to time. If you have a problem with securing your customers’ online data, switch to a more reliable hosting provider, like Rackhost.
Of course, this is a long journey. You can’t solve anything instantly. But probably your stakeholders do not expect that either. They want you to be determined about your change. If you can show that, they stay with you during the phase of reshaping.
- Conclusion
In this article, we explored a couple of negative corporate examples and understood why a company becomes unethical.
We also gave you some tips which help you to always go on the ethical line, and not try to go in other directions for the sake of a little money or survival. Ethical marketing has become a very large slice of today’s marketing industry, and it will stay relevant till a new completely fair corporate world arrives.
