Of Guerrilla Marketing, Ethics, and Mooninites
News travels fast these days, so I don't need to tell anyone that, right here in Boston, a guerrilla marketing stunt mobilized the police force and shut down significant parts of the city for several hours. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you are welcome to read this news story about what happened and the artists that got arrested for doing it.
It happened almost a week ago, so it's basically ancient history at this point, but if anyone is still interested in reading about it, they should check out this engaging post from the blog of John Cass, the Immediate Past President of the Boston chapter of the AMA.
Aside from pulling together a representative sampling of blogospheric responses from the MySpace Generation - most of which were critical of both the guerrillistas as well as the city officials who had in fact overlooked the offending devices for several weeks before responding with overwhelming force - I appreciated that John turned the discussion to a broader consideration of marketing ethics.
In addition to making some very practical and reasonable recommendations regarding the proper conduct of guerrilla marketers, such as asking property owners for permission if you are going to put things on their property, he also quotes from a number of ethical codes, including that of the AMA itself. The particular passage of that code which he cites begins, "Marketers must foster trust in the marketing system."
Why don't people trust the marketing system? Because they understand that the purpose of marketing is to influence their behavior. Given that, can any kind of marketing that goes beyond the straight-forward communication of unbiased and objective information about the benefits and risks of particular products and services ever be entirely trustworthy?
To put it another way, would it be unreasonable to amend the AMA's code slightly to read in the following way? "Marketers must foster trust in the marketing system by simultaneously fostering a healthy skepticism towards all marketing efforts."
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Comments
I'm glad you found John's post to be food for thought (since I did too). Interestingly, ethics is a topic that I've found the AMA focuses on a great deal (for example one of our discussion topics last Wednesday was "Have you ever marketed a product that you wouldn't use yourself?" Discuss!). Regarding your own post, I agree that it's asking people a lot to expect them to trust the marketing system (considering it's purpose!). However, I do think it can still be conducted in a trustworthy way, and that the goal of building trust is a good one in any case. Yet that it could be achieved by simultaneously fostering healthy skepticism may be more difficult (considering that the folks who pay the bills--and ultimately our paychecks--may see that as somehow counter to the task)--even though it's a worthy goal whenever it can be done. It would certainly require a good deal of creativity and ambition. What I would prefer is that our educational system do a little more of that--even while it's clear that our media/entertainment complex does little to help foster any of that at all (if not working directly at cross-purposes with it!). I think that if we as a country had some healthy skepticism, we might not have been led to rush headlong into Iraq in the way that we did... But then, I guess that's a whole other layer, isn't it?
Posted by: Ben Gregg @ Feb 5, 2007