ABC Of Marketing Ethics
The collective of moral principles your branding strategy is guided by, is what we call the Marketing Ethics. The ethics you decide upon are there to serve the interests and expectations of your targeted customers. Potential and loyal ones alike.
Ethics determine how long your customer would want to stay connected to your brand. It’s just like what we value as individuals in a co-working space. Quite often we don’t want to do business with an individual who has poor work-ethic right? Same goes for marketing.
5 Elements Of Good Marketing Ethics
Correct Ethics of Marketing are based on five major components: Empathy, Honesty, Transparency, Promise-Keeping and Sustainability. If you lack even one out of these five, it will surely show up in your progression in engagement and sales. These five elements are as crucial as the well-known five elements of nature in alchemy.
Edana is Your Digital Agency in Switzerland
We support you from strategy to execution
Magic Of Marketing Ethics
For a fun example, let’s say you’re an alchemist (Brand Owner), you need to make a philosopher’s stone (excellent marketing strategy) and you need five elements of nature (five elements of marketing ethics). Basic ingredients cannot be replaced, or you will get a completely different stone which will not serve you for long.
Marketing Ethics And Work Environment
After some fun of the alchemic examples let’s get back to more realistic aspect of the creation. Your marketing ethics will surely affect your working environment. It’s not just how your customers see you, the perception of your team matters just as much.
Honesty plays a huge role in this case. Just imagine telling your creative team to write a copy about the product that is not completely true. They might do it, but most likely the team will be first to lose trust in you and your brand. This generally leads to the loss of great, professional team-members.
Element 1 – Empathy
Your customers are not just people buying your stuff. These are the individuals who granted you their trust and support by purchasing and engaging with your brand. Keep in mind, that your target audience has some common interests and issues which you can address at least through social media and make your audience feel heard. Do not neglect the emotional aspect of communication.
Element 2 – Honesty
Honesty is valued highly and it’s a fact. You might have heard tons of complaints about numerous brands, that they earned the trust of audience and decided to slack off on quality after a certain period of time. Some customers might continue to buy that product for a little while until they find another alternative.
Try to stay honest about your production and not disappoint the audience. Clearly, mistakes can be made on the road, but don’t try to blame a third party for them. Be honest, admit and try to make up for it as timely as possible.
Element 3 – Transparency
Transparency can be showcased in many ways. One of those is live sessions on social media to demonstrate the working environment or making the product. Some brands decide to gate keep the inner space of the company.
Of course everything that makes you exclusive cannot be published into the world, but showing at least some of your creative process creates the feeling of transparency, which gives you the trust from your audience.
Element 4 – Promise Keeping
Means what it sounds like. Keep your promises. When putting a product out in the world, we provide the audience a certain solution with it. So, verbally or not, we promise that our product can do something to better some aspect of their daily routine. Make sure it’s not just an empty promise and stay true to the purpose of your product and brand.
Element 5 – Sustainability
And here we are with the final element of marketing ethics. Quality has higher value than quantity. This goes for your product as well. You could provide audience with numerous low-quality products, but they can never make up for a single high-quality product.
Sustainability is best exemplified in Car Productions. We all know at least one car model that can over-rule many lower quality models. Customers tend to prefer paying a good amount for high-quality product once, then for numerous ones which cost less and last for a shorter period of time.
What We Offer
If you want more expertise on communication strategies, check out our Edana blog, as well as all our services. Feel free to contact us at any time!