Financial service providers sometimes get a bad rap for not creating any wealth themselves—they shuffle other people’s money around, the argument goes, in order to get a larger portion of yet other people’s money.
Right or wrong, similar disdain is given to marketers. The quintessential picture of a marketer is the sleazy used car salesman who will say anything to “make a deal.” This person has two talents: lying, and manufacturing need—tricking people into wanting something they really have no need for.
As someone jumping out on my own as a particular kind of marketing consultant, it behooves me to ask myself:
Do marketers create wealth, or just manufacture need?
Creating wealth means that everyone’s dollar (or pound, rupee, or mark) is worth just a tiny bit more in light of being able to purchase your product. The iPhone is the poster child for creating wealth in the early 21st century. Simply in light of it existing, my $199 now has just a little bit more value, because I could use it to buy this amazing product that, while it may have been “anticipated” by other smartphones (heck, I’d argue that the iPhone 3GS was the first true iPhone, but that’s neither here nor there…), was completely revolutionary for its time.
What’s more, an entire industry has built up around the iPhone, focused on creating very small amounts of value (apps) and selling them at very low prices. As an iPhone owner, my $0.99 is worth just a tiny bit more in light of its ability to buy the spectacular camera app Camera+. Heck, some of the best apps on the market are free—you don’t even need $0.99 for your life to be meaningfully improved by them! (I’m looking at you, Evernote and Google Maps.)
As Paul Graham of Y Combinator says,
Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around.
So although there may be . . . a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
We can rephrase our question, then: do marketers’ services make everyone’s dollar worth just a little bit more in light of those services existing?
My answer, as you can guess by the fact that I’m still in this business and can hold my head up high, is yes.
Customers might not know about their need—or your solution
The antithesis to the idea of the sleazy salesman “manufacturing a need” is showing your prospects a real need that they might not know exists. For instance, when I worked with the creators of the X-Plane flight simulator, we worked hard to speak to pilots. This is a group that, on the whole, is less than tech-savvy. There’s a very good chance that they might not even know that they can practice takeoffs and landings on their home computer. This is awful, since practicing tricky situations in a flight simulator really does save pilots’ lives!
In this case, by telling pilots that training in our simulator will help them fly safer and more confidently, we very well may be highlighting a need that they didn’t know existed—they might have never known they could train outside of a real-life (potentially dangerous) situation.
We showed prospective customers a real need that they didn’t know they wanted to solve—that they might not have known they could solve. This creates a win-win scenario (which is crucial to ethical marketing), where we improve our customer’s lives in exchange for their money.
Money is not evil
This brings us to another important point. Repeat it with me:
Money is not evil.
Despite the (direct or indirect) indoctrination you may have received, your company deserves to make money. I love the way Alan Weiss (the “Million Dollar Consultant”) puts it in his book Value-Based Fees:
[Your fees] are not a “necessary evil” or a “dirty part of the job,” but rather a wonderful and appropriate exchange for the superb value you are delivering.
If your business is providing real value to your customers—like X-Plane provides value to pilots—being paid for your product is the only just compensation. Your attitude is not “How much can I trick my customers out of?”, but rather “How much value can I provide them?”. This is a profoundly moral question, and you should be proud to tell your customers “You’ll get $x worth of value from my product.”
(Interestingly, the political philosopher Robert Nozick argues persuasively that this sort of trade will arise naturally in any situation with a modicum of freedom, even a communist state. See Anarchy, State, and Utopia for more.)
With this in mind, if you can persuade your prospects that your products are worth their asking price (while being 100% honest), you should do it.
Sometimes this persuasion will deal with objective facts—for instance, “typical users save $500/year using our product”. Other times it will be subjective—like “our product will give you peace of mind.” Your customers are adults. Let them decide whether that benefit is worth your asking price.
“So you manipulate customers?”
Recently, I told a friend about the kinds of copywriting changes I made for the sake of conversion optimization—in a nutshell, “showing the right customers the right message at the right time.” His response was, “So you manipulate customers?”
At the time, that caught me off guard, but I see now why he thought that. In the end, though, changing a product’s messaging does not equate to manipulation. Consider a few possible ways of marketing a generic product:
- “This is the easiest way on earth to give customer support!”
- “Your business will look more professional to clients when you use our product.”
- “You could improve customer satisfaction ratings by 50% using our product.”
Assuming all of the above are true (for past customers or some reasonable, hypothetical customer), we can be 100% honest and still choose to emphasize just one of those. If we find that prospects are most likely to be persuaded by 2), there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing it way more than 1) or 3). We’re choosing which true characterization of our product to show our prospects.
This doesn’t strike me as manipulation, by any definition.
The bottom line
Our question was this:
Do marketers’ services make everyone’s dollar worth just a little bit more in light of those services existing?
My answer is yes: marketers create value (rather than just shuffling money around) in 2 main ways:
- By connecting customers who might not otherwise be aware of their needs (or a solution to those needs) to companies who can improve their lives.
- By helping companies find the (100% honest) messages that resonate best with customers.
The above offers present a “win” for the company (which gets to profit from the sale, continue offering their services to more customers, and so on) and a “win” for the customer (whose life is improved in some small way by the product). Furthermore, apart from marketing, these “wins” would not be possible—marketers create this value.
Caveats
I don’t want to give the impression that I think our stereotypical “sleazy car salesman” is anything but that. I’m not saying that all marketing is noble or good—just that it doesn’t have to be underhanded and reprehensible. All of the above is predicated on your company having real value to offer customers. (I have no doubt this is true for my readers.)
The pathological product
I’ve emphasized above that perhaps the most important component of ethical marketing is to create a win-win scenario. If your products improve your customers’ lives, by all means, tell them that!
On the other hand, there are people whose lives would probably be worse for having purchased from you—whether because they’ve wasted their money or because your product will actually harm them.
These are people who, with the right messaging on your part, will simply elect to not buy from you. As a trivial example, if you’re completely uninterested in flying, it should be clear to you that you have no reason to purchase X-Plane. Similarly, if I were marketing a hard-core fitness program at a gym, I probably shouldn’t be targeting people existing health problems! The worst thing you can do as a marketer is to deliberately sell to people for whom your product is pathological.
McDonalds is a good example of this. If McDonalds’ target customers were people who ate there a couple times a month, there would be no issue—a few greasy burgers a month will have a negligible effect on one’s health. This isn’t the case, though: their ideal customer is one who visits habitually—and suffers all the negative effects of doing so.
McDonalds is pathological for their ideal customer, and for a marketer who wants to add value to the world, this is unacceptable.
(As an aside, this is probably true of many restaurants, but that’s neither here nor there.)
The dark side of product messaging
Another potentially unsavory component of marketing is selling to the “dark side” of human emotions—lust, envy, and the like. The cynical “sex sells” is a great example of this. Many companies have found that subtly promising to make people more desirable is an effective marketing tactic. “Effective,” of course, depends on your definition—if your definition focuses on connecting the right customer to the right product, it may be less effective.
I don’t believe this sort of marketing is as terrible a trespass as being “pathological” to your customers, but the two often go hand-in-hand. Moreover, you may have to really stretch your definition of your “typical customer” in order to make these kinds of claims true—to the point of it being impossible to make these claims honestly. And make no mistake: you’re as responsible for your implicit messages (like “this product will make you sexier”) as you are for your explicit messages.
With that said, would I be comfortable using this sort of messaging, assuming it was true for a reasonable “typical” customer? Under the right conditions, yes. For instance, consider a cologne ad: many of the people who buy cologne do so specifically for its sex appeal, and the right cologne will verifiably make a person more attractive. Not a lot of products pass this test, but I do think it’s possible to use this “dark side” messaging ethically.
What do you think?
Are you convinced? Do you marketers really create value?
What about the “dark side”? Would you be okay with that kind of messaging?
Drop me a comment and let me know what you think!