Ethics and Marketing: A Line in the Sand

Marketing ethics go beyond industry regulations or platform terms of use. Ethical concerns in marketing go deeper, forcing organizations and agencies to evaluate strategy, content, and tools to respect consumers’ rights.

In an industry known for toeing the line, modern technologies like artificial intelligence and murky privacy rules have made doing the right thing murkier than ever.

Here, we discuss the pillars of ethical marketing and a few examples of brands putting profits ahead of principles – and paying the price.

First, What Is Ethical Marketing?

Marketing ethics are clearly defined principles that guide a company’s promotional activities. A brand’s marketing standards should reflect its core principles as defined by its mission statement or business philosophy. In many cases, the ethical issues in marketing serve as an extension of a company’s environmental, social, and governance commitments, brand strategy, and overall identity.

The Four Pillars of Ethics in Marketing

Ethical marketing is guided by the four principles listed below.

1. Honesty in Marketing

Marketing should be truthful, transparent, and complete. Deceptive marketing always backfires, tarnishing the brand’s identity and making future promotions inherently suspect. Advertisers should evaluate product and service marketing claims for potential misunderstandings and clearly define features, pricing structures, and relevant terms and conditions.

Dishonest, unethical marketing practices combine misinformation and structural barriers to trap and confuse users. Take dark patterns (sophisticated design practices that can trick or manipulate consumers into buying products or services or giving up their privacy), or the practice of deliberately making it hard to unsubscribe from a service. Companies selling subscription services and software sometimes make it hard to cancel a subscription, making the process confusing, redundant, and unnecessarily difficult. The problem is so prevalent that a recent Federal Trade Commission report warned of brands “making it difficult to cancel subscriptions or charges” and highlighted a legal case it pursued in court.

Deceptive marketing practices like these are dishonest, harmful, and illegal but inherently difficult to regulate.

2. Respect in Marketing

Historically, respecting consumers focused on discrimination and privacy. While those tenets hold true, they’re encompassed in the digital issues surrounding data collection. Consumers have a right to control their data and to choose how companies use it, which has led to legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and massive lawsuits against Google and other tech companies.

3. Dignity in Marketing

Respect for the consumer entails a basic recognition of human dignity. One of the most pervasive ethical issues in marketing is manipulation and deception. Influencer marketing has created an entire industry of online personalities making unproven product claims with little oversight, even if they don’t actually use the product.

Corporate marketing isn’t above making misleading marketing claims. The Kellogg Company based a long and successful campaign claiming Frosted Mini Wheats improved children’s attentiveness in school by 20%. It didn’t, and Kellogg ultimately paid a $4 million settlement to avoid a lawsuit.

4. Responsibility in Marketing

Companies owe their employees, shareholders, industry, and customers to market responsibly, including keeping consumers safe. This goes beyond ensuring marketing messaging is honest or accurate; it means understanding how the product impacts the consumer’s health and well-being. For example, tobacco companies used cartoons like Joe Camel to appeal to kids despite knowing for over three decades that its products were additive and linked to cancer.

Today, there’s a similar debate on social media’s impact on kids. A leaked internal study from Meta showed the company knew of potentially harmful side effects of social media use, even as it actively developed ways to attract younger users with addictive interfaces.

How closely brands adhere to these principles and apply them over time as technologies change – and how consumers react when brands cross the line – serve as continuous examinations of broader ethical issues.

The Line Between Ethical and Unethical Marketing Isn’t Always Clear

The unethical marketing examples mentioned above were clear-cut; in most cases, the brands knew in advance they were being unethical. That isn’t always the case. The growing use of artificial intelligence, for example, is raising new ethical issues in marketing, such as:

• Should companies acknowledge AI-generated content?
• Who should decide whether an AI image, text, or voice infringes on personal privacy?
• Who is responsible for harmful or misleading AI content, the user or the publisher?
• Who should regulate AI companies if they crawl content without permission?

The answers to these questions and others will change marketing, business, and society as a whole – and so far, no one can agree on where things will go next.

Honesty Is Always the Best Policy

Effective marketing relies on authenticity, honesty, and a personal connection between the brand and the audience. At Oneupweb, we’ve spent nearly three decades building our reputation as a responsible, trustworthy marketing partner with clients across industries.

For detailed marketing strategy and honest feedback, you can always count on us for a much-needed gut check. Let’s get started; contact our team or call (231) 922-9977 today.