How To Be A Moral Marketer
I’ve never met an artist, an activist, or an intellectual who liked marketing. I’m a marketer, and I don’t like most of us either. What is there to like about someone trying to sell us things?
Traditional marketing pries open our intellectual and emotional armor. We feel almost forced into buying the newest shoe, beauty, or fitness trend. Then we resent marketing for selling us things we don’t need, that often don’t work, and that don’t make us happy.
But there’s another path. One in which the marketing we create leaves people better than we found them, whether or not they buy our product. It makes for better businesses, a better planet, and better people.
Whether you’re a marketer or a CEO trying to evaluate marketing options, there are five principles you can follow to feel great about how your business is generating sales.
The Traditional Marketing Path
Traditional marketing trades short-term wealth and gains for a few in exchange for damaged self-perception, societies, and the environment for us all.
Take, for example, the case of plastics. Originally designed as an inexpensive alternative to ivory, plastics had a problem. Plastic was so cheap to produce and so durable that it would last forever. For plastics companies to grow, they had to convince people to throw the plastics they used out.
A brilliant marketing campaign arose, the “throwaway life.” Plastics positioned themselves as something cheap and intentionally disposable. Plastics would replace doing dishes. “Just throw them out!”. They would keep things cleaner. “The more plastic, the cleaner!” It worked.
As I stroll through the aisles of my local organic food store, I often stare in awe as people pick up vegetables from the fresh cold cases, only to put them in a plastic bag for a five-minute trip home.
We’re conditioned to believe it’s “dirty” to allow vegetables to touch our shopping carts, a conveyer belt, or the hands of the clerk. So, we place our produce in individual plastic bags, so they don’t touch those things or one another.
All the while ignoring the literal dirt our veggies just emerged from, the hands of the people picking it, stocking it, and squeezing it to find the ripest one. Plastics are ubiquitous, even when entirely unnecessary.
This irrationality stems from the traditional marketing practice that plastics are cleaner and safer. (It doesn’t matter that your orange, banana, and avocado are already wrapped in biodegradable packaging when picked from the tree. Or that you’ll wash your produce when you eat it anyway.)
By leveraging elitism, scarcity, and fear, traditional marketing works best when it engineers a problem to sell you the solution. Products ranging from razors to cornflakes, and certainly almost every fitness and beauty product has done the same thing.
A few people occasionally get rich. The rest of us inherit social, environmental, relational, and emotional crises.
What would happen if our marketing was measured by more than just short-term financial gains? What if it was measured by how much good it did?
Morally Aligned Marketing Success
“The Peacemaker taught us about the Seven Generations. He said, when you sit in council for the welfare of the people, you must not think of yourself or of your family, not even of your generation. He said, make your decisions on behalf of the seven generations coming so that they may enjoy what you have today.”
Oren Lyons (Seneca) Faithkeeper, Onondaga Nation
As businesses and cultures begin to invest in diversity, representation, inclusion, and environmentalism—marketing strategy is usually a stone left unturned. We believe it’s a necessary evil to keep our businesses running. But marketing doesn’t have to be evil. And it can do more than sustain a business. It can nourish our emotional, intellectual, social, and environmental wellness at the same time as our bottom line.
Morally aligned marketing doesn’t just grow the bottom line of a business. It leaves consumers better than it found them.
Principle One: Dignity
Traditional marketing makes people feel that if they don’t invest in their product, they will not be able to achieve a full and happy life. Morally aligned marketing shows people the alternatives clearly.
I’ll never forget the first time I opened a Patagonia magazine, and near the front of it, it read, “Don’t buy it if you don’t need it.” It walked through how to repair their outdoor gear on your own, send it to them to get it fixed, or where to go to buy something used first before purchasing a new product from them.
When you build marketing that assumes your consumer doesn’t need you and that their lives would be fine without you, you no longer induce shame for short-term gains. And you eliminate any marketing campaign that preys on our lower nature of insecurity, shame, fear, and consumerism.
Moral marketing starts with giving people the dignity and respect to make a choice, and it acknowledges that we are good enough already.
Principle Two: Honesty
Be transparent about what your product delivers, under what parameters, and what it doesn’t.
Marketing got its bad name from snake oil and used car salespeople. Being dishonest to make money doesn’t work long. When the world uncovered that the original snake oil salesman was actually selling castor oil, his business went bust. When Elizabeth Holmes sold pipedreams instead of blood tests, her business eventually crumbled too.
When a business is dishonest (or over-indulges in benefits while under-indulging costs), it leaves consumers unhappy and puts the company on a churn and burn cycle. To make up for the dissatisfied customers, they have to constantly acquire new ones, rather than relying on referrals or repeat business.
There’s a reason word of mouth marketing is the most potent form of marketing. It’s trustworthy. We believe people when we know they aren’t getting anything in return for recommending it.
Businesses that don’t meet the expectations they set for themselves have short life spans, unhappy customers, and in my experience, extremely unhappy CEOs and employees.
Rigorous honesty that your product doesn’t deliver the moon and stars increases brand loyalty and consumer confidence—creating a longer-term return on investment and gaining people who will recommend your brand, even if it isn’t for themselves.
Take, for example, MUD\WTR, a brand that sells a morning coffee alternative. They named their drink after mud, showing that the flavor might not be for everyone, but they also described the taste as merely “earthy, a little chocolatey, and slightly spicy .” They didn’t say, “it tastes better than your morning coffee, and it’ll make you feel better too.”
The results? People buy it for effect, not flavor. And when they feel the effect, they recommend it.
When I told someone recently I was thinking about quitting caffeine, they asked if I’d tried MUD\WTR, following up that they haven’t tried it themselves but heard that it was good. Rigorous honesty leads to loyalty.
MUD\WTR’s business is booming for it.
Principle Three: Consent
How often do we hand over our private information and give marketers a way to contact us in exchange for what we think is a one-time coupon or reward, only to find out there’s a never-ending slew of communication?
Or worse, we buy once, and with no consent, we get contacted forever after. Two years ago, I bought a workout top at Athleta. I’ve been getting physical mail from them ever since.
Not only do I not want to buy from Athleta because I’m so annoyed with this breach of trust, I know every piece of mailing is now wasted ad dollars and wasted materials.
Be transparent in what will happen and when, and allow your consumer to choose. When they willingly opt-in to receiving your materials, you’re more likely to make a sale because of it.
(Despite my love of Patagonia, this is an area I’d like to see them improve too. When you make an online purchase from Patagonia, you automatically get enrolled in paper mailings. The same mailing that encourages you to reduce and reuse resources. Asking customers when they check out if they’d like to receive their magazine would reduce non-consensual marketing materials being sent out and consumption of paper goods.)
Principle Four: Representation
Representation goes beyond making sure there’s diversity in pictures in ads. It means making sure the marketing uses the actual language, views, and perspectives of the people consuming the product.
When you guess who is using your product and why you make a lot of assumptions. You bring your baggage into the marketing process, and intentionally or not, inject shame into it.
This often happens with men writing ads about women or people with light skin writing ads targeting people with dark skin — often without having any direct conversation with the people using the product.
Morally aligned marketing means it’s informed by, and directly connected to, the people using the product. It doesn’t guess why they’re using it or presuppose how it makes them feel. It uses their actual words and language to create the campaigns that resonate with them, and it pays them fairly in the process.
Excellent qualitative research is at the beginning of every morally aligned marketing campaign.
Principle Five: Deliver Value In Advance
Finally, measure your marketing not just by how successful it is in attracting the right people to your product but by whether or not the people who engage with the marketing feel it was valuable. Regardless of if they buy your product, you’ll leave the world in a much better place.
When I was just starting my career, I came across Ramit Sethi. In looking at buying his online “Dream Job” course, the company emailed me a lot of free materials and encouraged anyone with debt or insufficient funds to start there. I did. Within two years, I had doubled my income using his free materials alone. I’ve been a customer and advocate for his products ever since. (I even ended up working with him.)
If your marketing leaves people feeling:
They have choices, and they understand them
Understood
Represented
Clear about what your product does and doesn’t do
They have more information, education, or understanding
Or they just feel happier, goofier, or lighter.
Then you’re leaving the world better than you found it.
Marketing Can Be Moral
If you’re a marketer like me and practice these principles in all of your marketing, you can sleep well at night knowing that your work is leaving the world better — yes, even through marketing.
If you’re a CEO or marketing decision-maker committed to the environment or welfare of the world, I urge you to measure your marketing success by not only the bottom line but by these five principles.