Marketing ethics – are you a weasel?

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I’m sticking my chin out with this post, but hey…

Marketers make people act on certain feelings about themselves. In a sense, that’s the very core of what we do; influencing people to feel, want, choose and do. Most of us dream of a better tomorrow and about feeling different, becoming something or someone else.  People act on such feelings. For the marketer, this implies moral responsibility.

Your new pretty eyewear won´t really make you a better person, that correlation is completely false, and believing so is irrational. But if you feel like it by owning and wearing them, then wearing them is a perfectly logic thing to do. The marketer knows this and will try to pull the right strings, connecting the eyewear to your need of becoming a better person. We all lie a little. This is ok, it’s good for people, society and business.

But if the marketer for instance get people hooked on cigarettes by making them feel liberated and free, then sorry, he is a weasel. The lie is awful. He knowingly makes us sick as individuals and as a society.

Seth Godin gets it right in his book, All Marketers Are Liars, explaining how ”just serving the market” or ”adults should have the right to make a decision about this” are the words of a weasel. I think that is a pretty accurate parable.

The false argument

Some would argue that it is fine to market anything, in any way, and that humans have the power to say; thanks but no thanks, in any given scenario. This is profoundly false and builds on the notion that free will makes it the consumers responsibility not to be influenced to action, especially if the action is bad for us as individuals and/or society. I happen to strongly disagree with this worldview.

As a marketer or PR professional, what is your moral responsibility?

The idea that the consumer (human beings that is) should be held responsible for choosing the ”right” thing regardless of marketing is just corrupt. Skillful marketing is powerful and the social psychological effects it can accomplish are astonishing. In itself, this is a reason for marketers to be held morally and ethically responsible for the quality of influence on people and society.

The power to choose

We human beings (clients, consumers, customers, targets, audiences, whatever you call us) really do not have the power to choose what we choose. No one knows why we choose the things we do. But we tend to act on feelings, like when a part of your body suddenly moves, the decision to move is done before the choice reached the conscious mind.

I agree with neuroscientist Sam Harris, that free will really does not exist. His reasoning is perfectly logical and beautifully described in his blog:

(…) But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me.”

Sam Harris is not alone in his point of view, Einstein and Schopenhauer was on to the same thing.

What this means for marketers?

Well, if we marketers actually can make people feel, want, choose and do, then we are morally responsible to ensure not only ethical and honest methods, but also that actions (by our influence), really are in the best interest of people. Because when people (you and I) choose or do things, we never really know why, and we are not able to do different. How could we?

The marketer, all of a sudden, is responsible for other peoples choices. Yes, we have to accept this huge responsibility. Not doing so makes us weasels.

P.S.

I just wrote a blog post, I couldn’t have done it differently. You just read it all, and in a deeper sense, neither you or I have a clue why.

But I’m glad you did.

Image: istockphoto.com