Are We Regressing To An Unethical Marketing Era?

Away from the deceptive advertising practices, and many psychological manipulation tactics used by marketers. We know they have resulted in our bad perception by many people.

Let’s talk about social proof deception !

In this write-up, I’ll be explaining astroturfing and sockpuppetier as the unethical strategy brands use to maneuver the social proof.

We see it in politics and its propaganda strategies ,but when it comes to businesses can it be tolerated as the norm?

From experience, I don’t trust people who say why they buy something.

They might not even know why they did so themselves.

Social pressure can make people subscribe to the norm even when it really does not make much sense.

Since man is wired to listen to other’s opinion and follow social proof, we tend to use people’s experience and recommendations to validate our decisions.

Most of our preferences are learned and formed by social norms and expectations.

Little wonder, people are fooled by the likes and followership of a page as the best metric for brand and personal acceptance and engagement.

Although not our fault!

We’re wired that way.

The realization of this phenomenon has made many brands to engage in unethical behaviors in order to get more customers and social acceptance.

What then is astroturfing?

It is the practice of creating a seaminly spontaneous and autonomous support for a firm without people’s knowledge that it was doctored.

Imagine I own a cake shop online( I can’t even bake to save myself), and i use one or more of my social platforms to open a false account which I’ll then use to create a positive review on my cake page to deceive others.

While sockpuppeting use same tactics but creates a negative remark through discreditng a competing brand online (this is pure cruel).

We all have experienced it consciously or not!

Statistics even has it that

• one third of ALL reviews are fake.

Yes, fake!

• 61 percent of electronic reviews are fake,
• 63 percent of the beauty industry reviews are fake too.

Am sure we will get shocked when the ecommerce industry result is collated.

Examples of these unethical practices include;

• Advertisements appearing to be from private websites or public-interest groups, redirecting to corporate-written pages (Many many people do this!)
• Companies employing people internally or bloggers to open fake accounts to credit themselves positively online.
• Companies using fake accounts to discredit it’s competitors through various forms of reviews.( This the proper definition of sockpuppeting. Although it is rife in politics)
• Practicing any of the above with the intention of attacking a rival company, rather than promoting one’s own products.

There are many other forms in which brands practice them.

It is a controversial and often disparaged practice.

These unethical practice adds up to the reasons the marketing field is not trusted by the market. We’re viewed as professional gimmicks and deception Lord’s.

How can we make our brands survive and thrive above such manipulative tactics?

If others are going in this direction, should we?

Certainly NOT!

A brand can survive and live above any form of unethical practices if it upgrades it’s marketing effort and enact superiority in it’s unique value proposition.

Yes!

By constantly evolving the knowledge and skills of your marketing team, you’ll grow your brand to have die hard loyals who will volunteer to be advocates.

Keep personal and brand development at the forefront, and you’ll certainly succeed

Stay safe!