Marketing can be a force for good. It can send “feel good” messages that help people accept and understand one another. It can help people discover solutions to problems—real problems that matter.
But when marketing works to fabricate problems—to invent necessity in the prospect’s mind—it becomes exploitative, even evil. One of the most disturbing strategies to achieve this is to play on people’s insecurities.
As a long-time marketer and CMO, I resent this approach. It’s a shame. And it’s dangerous.
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“Nuclear weapons have killed a tiny fraction of the number of people that unethical marketing has. It’s time we realized that there may be no more powerful weapon on Earth.” — Seth Godin, marketing guru
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It’s the strategy behind campaigns that tell women they must transform their appearance. Plastic surgeons advertising the word “BIG” stamped across a woman’s chest. Or razor companies telling women they’ll become like “dudes” if they don’t shave.
It’s why predatory advertising often targets women on Mondays, when they’re more likely to feel vulnerable.
Men face this type of messaging, too.
Some advertising for energy drinks, for example, is designed to tap into male insecurities. “[Researchers] found that the more a man bought into masculine ideals,” wrote The New Yorker’s Rachel Giese, “the more he believed that energy drinks made him manly—and the more he drank them, the more his sleep was troubled.”
And some advertising-to-insecurities goes after men and women alike — like mouthwash ads designed to scare everyone into thinking they secretly have bad breath. (Halitosis wasn’t perceived as a medical condition until a company realized it could help sell mouthwash.)
In the marketing community, the prevailing argument is that this kind of manipulation is inevitable. And to some extent, that’s true. There will always be marketers who work to make buyers feel bad about themselves.
But marketing doesn’t need to lean on this strategy. Many successful marketers and business leaders already know this, and therefore approach their work from a different perspective.
“Stop selling. Start helping.” — Zig Ziglar, sales guru
“As marketers, we should be changing the mantra from ‘always be closing’ to ‘always be helping.’” — Jonathan Lister, LinkedIn VP
“Good marketing essentials [speak to the fact that] we all are emotional beings looking for relevance, context, and connection.” — Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair at GE
To end this kind of evil marketing, brands should focus on helping people in relevant ways.
Consumers have plenty of problems that can benefit from solutions. There’s no need to manufacture imaginary ones. So if the product you’re selling can only be marketed by encouraging or creating insecurities, you’re selling the wrong product.
I believe that the vast majority of services and products offer a good, legitimate purpose. They help consumers save time or money; take better care of themselves, or find moments of positivity—such as joy, comfort, or strength. Marketing should highlight these features. And even when products don’t necessarily fall into any of these buckets, marketers can still demonstrate positive reasons to make a purchase—reasons that don’t prey on anxiety, doubt, tension or dread in the face of uncertainty.
So makeup doesn’t have to be sold as a way to make sure you’re pretty; it can be there to help you create a ritual of self-care and enjoyment. Caffeinated drinks don’t have to be presented as a way to make you manlier; they can be there to help you feel the energy to create work that matters, work you’re proud of.
To find these positive angles, marketers need simply to pay attention to what the users of their products or services have to say. Through my work at G2 Crowd (which has the largest collection of honest reviews from software users), I’ve seen that the most satisfied customers of any product are often ones with inspirational stories about how those products helped them.
Marketers can also do good by “sharing happiness” to help restore people’s faith in humanity. And they can help build a better world by creating campaigns for good causes, like uniting Israelis and Palestinians through a blood drive or increasing the number of American parents who speak with pediatricians about autism.
This is my rallying cry to marketers in 2019: People don’t need more reasons to feel bad about themselves or their businesses. They need help making constant, incremental improvements against real problems, big and small.
That must be our focus as marketers. It must be our driving force.
In the year ahead, let’s do better.
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