A key part of any marketing plan is the promotional aspect: how to build awareness of your products and persuade people to make a purchase. Digital tools allow more precise audience targeting, while online platforms encourage passivity. What does this mean for ethics when it comes to using persuasion techniques in marketing campaigns? And how can users protect themselves against manipulation?
I’ve touched on some of the ethical aspects of promotion in a previous post, examining how the techniques used in marketing campaigns are also exploited by fraudsters.
I’m revisiting the topic after reading How Spies Think by Sir David Omand, the former head of GCHQ. After several sections covering critical thinking techniques (spying is mostly about cold calculations of probability and assessing evidence – not high-speed car chases or playing high-stakes poker) Omand includes a review of how the Internet exposes all users to the possibility of control. His examples and arguments focus on the use of the internet by states or terrorist organizations to influence voting (Russian involvement in the 2016 US election, for example).
This made me think again about how much online marketing also uses similar techniques, and how important it is to ensure that marketing practices are not only effective but also ethical.
Data, not content, is king.
Everywhere you go on the Internet, you leave a digital footprint, a trail of data, which is collected and used in several ways. Most notably to target advertising, which is what makes it such a valuable commodity.
If you visit a website and make a purchase, your visit – or visits – are tracked by the site owners using Google Analytics or something similar. From the source where you found them to how many visits it took for you to make a purchase through how many options you considered, all the data helps to build up a picture. Tools such as Hotjar give website owners the ability to look over users’ shoulders to see exactly how they engage with the site.
As we all know, Google collects data on all the millions of searches carried out every day – it’s this data that helps them to continuously build and improve on their algorithms.
Although the amounts of data are vast, it doesn’t mean that users are anonymous – it’s still possible to track users at an individual level. (The Google ban on cookies has been delayed to late 2023.)
Mass targeting individuals
In the early days of mass marketing, promotion involved throwing the message out as widely as possible across a range of media hoping that some of it would hit home. Then targeting was developed: define exactly who you want to reach, split them further into segments and craft your messages for each segment. Although more refined, it was still a blunt instrument. No matter how carefully researched your personas are – it’s still mass marketing. You send out the message and hope it resonates with some of the individuals.
What the Internet, with all its data collection, has enabled, is mass personalized marketing. Retargeting is an example of this: where a product you have looked at online is advertised on other sites you then visit. Someone else looking at the site will see a completely different set of ads.
Your own online reality
What many people don’t realize is how much of the online ‘reality’ they experience is tailored around them. Across search engines, through retargeting and social media, what you see will be tailored according to your previously recorded likes, subscriptions, searches and interactions – not to mention your location and often your demographic group. This means that when engaging with the Internet, one person’s ‘reality’ will look very different from another’s. This is from the level of the adverts which are shown to you, right down to what results you get on an Internet search.
The benefit is that you get a more personalized experience – and the downside is that it easily distorts and unbalances what you see. It can create an echo-chamber where users are cocooned in layers of information that reinforce their beliefs, and where they are not exposed to contradictory or new ideas. It’s in this environment, where users are not challenged to question but only encouraged consume, rate and share the content they see, that persuasive techniques easily become insidious.
Sadly, much of this is driven by marketing: it’s the advertising spend that keeps the Internet as we know it going. Advertisers want transparent ROI and this is exactly what digital media provides as the whole customer journey from initial contact, to first purchase right up to customer lifetime value is trackable and an analyzable. And a docile, receptive audience makes this process so much easier.
Legislation such as GDPR is helping to hold marketers and organizations to account in how individuals’ data is used, but so far there’s little discussion about the ethics of persuasion in such an environment.
Why critical thinking is so important
Most companies that advertise online are not attempting to manipulate their audiences, but there is something about the digital world that lulls people into a passive state. Possibly this is because interactions often take place in a safe physical location which doesn’t trigger the primeval part of our brains into recognizing that you are in a situation where you need to be on guard. If you are walking down an unfamiliar street, on your own, your will be more aware of what is going on around you than if you are sitting on your sofa: Instagram feels like a safe, cosy space not a public arena. Scrolling through images and posts is also a mesmerizing activity – or it is for me, at least – which make being on guard against misinformation or manipulation even more difficult.
Omand lists a number of steps to take to help protect yourself from manipulation and deception such as being aware of what might be misinformation, correcting false information and thinking twice before sharing stories that may be fake news.
I’d add to this how important it is to be aware of the digital footprint you leave behind yourself. It can be easy to blindly accept all cookies (especially because the pop-up buttons are so irritating) but it’s worth taking time to think about what you are really agreeing to. Would you walk along the high street stopping to stick your address, along with other personal information, to lampposts as you pass them? Is the digital footprint you leave as you move from site to site really much different – apart from being invisible to you? Using a combination of critical thinking together with awareness of how your data is collected and used goes a long way. Engage with the content you see online – don’t just passively consume it.
What does this mean for marketers?
I think the message is clear, and no different than it has always been in terms of ethics. Although digital tools have created more opportunities to target and influence, the need to be truthful, fair and legally compliant in promotional messages hasn’t changed. Just because it’s now easier to use messaging to manipulate, it doesn’t mean that marketers should stoop to it.
It might be an easy win today, but the ultimately the brand will pay the price in the long term with a loss of trust and reputation.