The Business Case for Moral Marketers

Why There’s ROI in Listening to Our Better Angels

Christina Garnett recently wrote an article calling for marketers to cease what she calls Machiavellian marketing.

It’s a great read, calling for an end to deceptive and manipulative tactics that turn prospects off.

In her words, “Customers are more selective because we taught them to be. Their trust is thin because we diluted the very concepts that once signaled honesty and care. When every emotion is engineered, customers learn to withhold their real ones. The tricks aren’t tricking anyone anymore.”

She’s right, of course.

Marketers have spent the last decade baiting, triggering, manipulating, misleading, harassing, hoodwinking, and disappointing prospects to such a degree, our online channels are on life support.

Leaving desperate brands grasping at straws like storytelling and community marketing.

But marketing’s ailments run too deep to be cured by yet another fad remedy.

In Garnett’s words, “We have taken concepts that were once human, relational and earned, and reshaped them into marketable items that can be slotted into a quarterly plan. In doing so, we have overlooked the cost of stripping these ideas from their roots and repurposing them for performance dashboards. We traded trust for attention.”

Again, all true.

But unfortunately, we live in the attention economy, and quarterly plans and dashboards aren’t going anywhere.

Marketing integrity has always been a tough sell. Never more so than now.

Machiavelli is in fashion.

Expeditiousness now governs how marketing is done.

ROI, a measure of what is financially expeditious, has become marketing’s paramount metric.

Any successful call for marketing ethics must appeal to it.

AI makes it possible for marketers to double down on their ROI-related bad habits almost without limit, and they’re currently under intense pressure to do just that.

And nobody gives a shit about customers. Not really.

We don’t talk to them (since we’re too busy talking at them). We don’t listen to them. We don’t research them. And most marketers aren’t held accountable to them.

We’re held accountable to quarterly plans and dashboards, to ROI.

Shady tactics and shortcuts are used in marketing for the same reasons they’re used everywhere else, they’re cheap and easy.

They have a great ROI when they work, or at least they appear to.

Treating a prospect like a mark can look great on a dashboard.

Treating the boss like a mark can look even better.

Marketing is full of temptations. Opportunities to cheat. To game the system.

Likes and followers can be bought.

Metrics engineered.

Search engines manipulated.

And the business consequences are real.

Dollars can be wasted. Google can punish you for playing games.

And a sock can be mistaken for a meaningful relationship.

Marketing and business leaders often look the other way when Machiavellian marketing tactics are employed because winning sometimes means doing questionable things.

But when marketers do questionable things in the field to win the war, what’s to stop them from doing questionable things to win the peace at home?

You’ve already started down the dark path, why not keep letting it dominate your destiny?

Since there’s little loyalty in business, marketers have little incentive to show yours any, and every incentive to run up their dashboard totals by any means necessary.

It takes a competent marketer with a healthy budget, reporting to the right kind of leaders, to win business the right way, but any hack can play ROI optimization games.

Gaming a dashboard requires no marketing expertise at all, and very few resources.

It really is that easy.

Can these shenanigans be caught and punished internally?

Theoretically, yes, but turnover is fast nowadays, leaving any resulting shitstorm as likely to leave a mess on the next person’s shoes.

And the only internal people with any real incentive to speak up will be those being hurt by, or in no position to benefit from, the shenanigans in question.

And most of them are in other silos.

And the waste is not trivial.

A recent study estimates that 25% of all B2B marketing spend is being wasted on efforts that appear successful on dashboards but fail to drive meaningful outcomes.

That’s over 10 million dollars up in smoke if you’re a typical billion-dollar company (spending 5-10% of revenue on marketing).

Of course, not all that is being lost to chicanery, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure until you’ve eliminated it, and plenty of ROI in doing so.

If you want marketing that works and doesn’t simply create the appearance of working, it is not enough to simply hire people who generated pretty numbers in their last job.

You must also hold them to an ethical standard in their current one, and not just through transparency, reporting, and monitoring.

Marketers must also believe that delivering unpleasant news is an option.

We all must be held accountable for what happens in our own yard, but when marketers have no power over product, price, or place, we’re often blamed for things outside our control (creating even more incentive to cheat).

Grown-up conversations must be had, at all levels of marketing, and in the silos upstream and downstream, about what is and isn’t realistic in terms of metrics and KPIs.

And about what is expected, what will be rewarded, and what will and will not be tolerated.