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How Should Companies Handle Underconsumption?

9/1/2024

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

I was fascinated to see video recently of a remote Amazonian tribe, deep in the rain forest of Peru, that’s one of the world’s last uncontacted people groups. Interestingly, while its members live successfully with very little, influencers in other parts of the world are suggesting minimalist lifestyles, being called underconsumption. Any trend of people buying less is troubling for many consumer-dependent companies, but it’s a great opportunity for firms to consider how they might diversify their goods portfolios and better meet consumers’ intangible needs.

The underconsumption movement apparently grew from a few people put off by the proliferation of self-proclaimed spokespeople using social media to promote an endless array of “must-have” products to their thousands or millions of followers. What’s more, the influencers receive many of the products they promote for free from the companies that market them, which makes their testimonials less trustworthy.

In contrast to those typical influencers whose bathrooms are bursting with new cosmetics and closets are cluttered with the latest workout gear, individuals advocating underconsumption show how little they own and how they find ways of doing more with less.

For instance, one TikTok user describes how for years she’s used the same tub of Vaseline for cracked hands, scrapes, and itchy skin. Vaseline smartly leaned into the content of this self-proclaimed brand advocate and included her clip on its TikTok site.

One can image how other brands with multifunctional products might take a similar tack. That’s what Arm & Hammer is doing on its TikTok site, which features videos of its iconic baking soda used for everything from cleaning dog toys, to washing pesticides from food, to relieving insect bites.

Of course, most brands don’t have the Swiss-army-knife utility of baking soda – there aren’t nearly as many varied uses for a Stanley Tumbler or Lululemon Leggings. Also, even brands like Vaseline and Arm & Hammer have product line extensions they also want to sell, e.g., Vaseline Hand Cream and Arm & Hammer Toothpaste.

Companies obviously need product sales in order to bring in revenue and earn income. Furthermore, that profit isn’t just self-enrichment. The money firms make allows them to pay taxes, provide employment, and pay dividends to shareholders, some of whom depend on the passive income during retirement.

So, how should companies that want to market mindfully respond to the underconsumption trend? Anytime there’s a challenge or problem, a good starting point is to ask why, in this case:

Why does underconsumption resonate with people?

There likely are several motivations for underconsumption, which may differ from person to person:

Money: Gen Zs, especially, may not have the discretionary income to spend on many non-necessities. Part of the problem is debt, which continues to rise nationwide: In the second quarter of 2024, U.S. credit card balances rose by $27 billion to $1.14 trillion. Some families are even going into debt to take Disney vacations.

Simplicity: Even for people who can afford more, the idea of decluttering and simplifying their life can be very appealing. It can provide peace of mind. Also, just like more money, more problems, one can argue that the more you own, the more things can go wrong, i.e., more possessions, more problems.
Stewardship: Some people feel that consuming less is something they can to do protect the environment and support sustainability. Fewer goods produced helps conserve natural resources, reduce carbon emissions, and lessen trash going to landfills.
Self-esteem: Staying out of debt, living a simpler life, and being a good steward also can make people feel good about themselves. Of course, individuals’ esteem also receives a boost when social media friends and followers like and share their unique posts.

Given the many compelling reasons for buying less, what should companies, which depend on people buying more, do? Here are four suggestions:

Understand how the motivations above apply to their own consumers. Some firms’ customers may be much more interested in saving the environment than in simplifying their lives. For others, it may be all about money. There’s little reason for an organization to discuss needs that don’t matter to its own customers.
Make multifunctional products: Stanley probably doesn’t want to promote that its tumbler also can be used as a flowerpot, but it has given the item some versatility by developing different interchangeable lids that allow the same bottle to be used in different ways, e.g., at work, in a car, while hiking, etc.
Give options for product disposal: People who are concerned about stewardship are probably more likely to buy products that they know they can trade in, resell, recycle, or upcycle into something else.
Understand what else people are doing with their money: For consumers whose motivation for buying less is not lack of funds but simplicity, stewardship, or self-esteem, there’s probably money they’re not spending on products that they’re using in other ways, like the four below. Granted, the examples may be more feasible for some firms than for others, but all are worth considering.
1. Paying off debt: Partner with a financial institution that provides debt consolidation services.
2. Saving: Work with a bank or other institution that offers savings instruments.
3. Spending on experiences: Develop marketable services, ideally ones related to the company’s goods, or partner (e.g., cobrand) with an organization that offers them. For instance, there are many kinds of goods makers, e.g., luggage, clothing, shoes, technology, that could consider opportunities related to travel.
4. Giving: Help customers find good causes to which they can donate. This approach is unlikely to be a direct revenue producer for the firm, but it is a worthwhile strategy that can count as corporate social responsibility, earning the firm goodwill and eventually new customers.

No matter what our worldview, we all should agree on several truths related to goods, that:

You can’t take them with you.
People are more important than things.
Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions (Luke 12:15, NIV).

Those living successfully in the Amazon rainforest with very little should remind us that it’s possible to survive without continually purchasing products from the other Amazon. Still, most companies that produce goods do help make our 21st century lives healthier, more productive, and more stimulating. These firms need to make money for our benefit and for theirs.

The four diversification strategies described above are general but might spark thoughts of how companies can complement their tangible product offerings with intangibles. Considering more carefully what one buys is mindful consumption. Understanding those consumer desires and building strategies to support them is Mindful Marketing.

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How to Talk Appropriately About Pooping

8/2/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

There are certain subjects polite people don’t discuss in public in order to maintain decorum and show respect to others. So, what do you do when you work in advertising and you’re asked to make commercials about one of those taboo topics? Even ad veterans can struggle with such an assignment, but two interns accepted the challenge and crafted a very creative and considerate campaign that surprisingly won one of advertising’s greatest accolades!

Every living person does several of the same things: breath, eat, sleep, excrete. While it’s generally acceptable to do the first three in public, social norms strongly discourage doing or even talking about bowel and bladder functions with others. Why? Probably because they involve private parts and because the outputs are by most standards . . . gross.

Meanwhile, billions of consumers regularly purchase a wide variety of products to assist in managing those two unseemly bodily functions, urination and defecation, from diapers to toilet paper to air fresheners. There also are products that individuals require at certain times when one of the functions isn’t performing properly, like laxatives.

Proper pooping is a serious concern. A recent study found a relationship between stool frequency and healthy kidney and liver function. Furthermore, “things like constipation are associated with chronic disease,” says Professor Sean Gibbons of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. This science underscores the importance of the promotional question:

How can one tactfully advertise a product that will relieve consumers’ constipation?

That was the very challenging assignment given to Rag Brahmbhatt and Nidhi Shah, interns at the advertising agency Serviceplan in Hamburg Germany. The client, Macrogol Hexal, wanted to promote its constipation-relieving powder, which, as suggested above, is not the most socially acceptable topic.

However, Brahmbhatt and Shah, two young people who are both from India, rose to the occasion, creating a very unique audio approach to communicate the ease of using the laxative and experiencing the desired bowel relief.

The pair pitched using a voice similar to that of British biologist and broadcaster David Attenborough in a series of nature-inspired scripts, accented with environmental sounds, to paint evocative pictures in listeners minds’, ostensibly about events like an otter sliding effortlessly into a river, but really about what Hexal can help happen on the toilet.

In addition to the otter sliding into a river, an AdAge article contains embedded video of other spots’ vivid metaphoric descriptions of a meteor landing in the ocean, a coconut falling, and a volcano erupting. Each spot culminates with a consistent question and answer “Could it be this easy? With Macrogol Hexal it is,” as well as the campaign’s fitting tagline, “Smooth Laxative Relief.”

Serviceplan submitted the work to Cannes Lions, the annual gathering in Cannes France where “the advertising and communications industry meets to celebrate the world's best work.” To the great surprise of Brahmbhatt and Shah, their otter spot won the top prize in the Script category of the Audio & Radio awards, a Gold Lion.

Beyond the very clever metaphors, the artfully written script, and the realistic sounds, what makes the work especially unique is how it took a very socially awkward issue – a taboo conversational topic and inelegant human action – and made it not just acceptable but inviting for mass communication.

That approach is in many ways counterintuitive and countercultural. While the two interns took the somewhat disgusting concept of constipation and made it decent, others in advertising unfortunately often do the opposite, i.e., To promote decent products like food, clothing, and cars, they use indecent promotion such as oversexualized images and expletives.

Why do others resort to indecency? Although one reason may be to cater to the tastes of certain target market members, the main reason is likely because indiscretion takes less creative thinking. In other words, it’s easier. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of companies that have made the low-level investment in indecency, for instance:

Liquid Death: In many ways the canned water company is a poster-child for indecency. It may be a cartoon ad, but in it blood flows everywhere as an axe-wielding brand mascot monster violently kills a dozen people.
Girls vs. Cancer: The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned the charity organization’s billboards, aimed at encouraging positive sex for women with cancer because of the catchphrase, “Cancer Won’t be the Last Thing that F*cks Me.”
Kraft Heinz: The maker of the world’s best-known macaroni and cheese, a perennial favorite kid food, has surprisingly leaned into profanity for promotions more than once, first asking consumers to “Get your chef together,” then, for a special Mother’s Day campaign, encouraging moms to “Swear Like a Mother.”

Can these low-brow approaches work? They can to some extent.

Most advertising aims to accomplish AIDA: grab attention, retain interest, tap into desire, and spur action. It’s not hard to get others’ attention by showing something vulgar, making an explicit reference to sex, or swearing. Sometimes a continuation of such clickbait-like tactics can even hold interest. It’s much less likely, though, that those approaches will lead to desire for the product or meaningful action.

Worse, indecency can do irreparable damage to a brand. What does a purportedly family-friendly company like Kraft gain by suggesting swearing, versus the credibility it stands to lose with stakeholders?

Remember Go-Daddy’s sex-infused Super Bowl commercials that over many years earned it the reputation as the big game’s “raciest advertiser”? The company eventually realized that sex doesn’t sell web services but has had difficulty rebounding from its well-established reputation for raunch.

More than any of these companies, Brahmbhatt and Shah could have legitimately capitalized on filth in making ads for a laxative. However, the two seemingly less-experienced interns dug deeper to develop a truly creative and clean campaign that likely will be effective for their firm’s client, Macrogol Hexal.

Does that mean the ads are entirely above reproach? Not necessarily. There is the possible issue of the ads using what sounds like Attenborough’s voice. Would you want your vocal likeness to endorse a laxative without your consent? It’s unclear whether Attenborough’s permission was something Serviceplan sought and gained.

In terms of decorum, it’s great that two emerging professionals have reminded the advertising industry that creativity doesn’t mean compromising values like decency. Moreover, Brahmbhatt and Shah have provided an excellent example of the moral math: effective + ethical = Mindful Marketing.

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Making Money from People Who Talk Funny

6/29/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

“Don’t make fun of the way others talk.” It’s a rule most of us learn early in life, but apparently not all advertisers have adopted it. Humorous ads can be entertaining and effective, but is it okay for them to poke fun at the speech patterns of specific people groups?

As a marketing professor, I probably pay more attention to advertising than most people do, which sometimes leads to seeing similarities among ads and noticing interesting trends. I recently saw several video spots, all from different advertisers, each lampooning the ways specific nationalities/ethnicities communicate:

It’s important to note that each portrayal is intended to be funny, which is certainly common for national ads – think Super Bowl commercials. But like beauty, humor is in the eyes and ears of the beholder, so when do commercials move from silly/stupid, to annoying/irritating, to distasteful/objectionable, to repugnant/offensive? Or, more specifically, when does mocking people’s accents become unethical?

Like communication in general, humor is highly contextual, which is why there are inside jokes that only people aware of a specific backstory understand. Mocking accents can be acceptable and even desirable in certain contexts of social intimacy. For instance, two friends – one from New York City and the other from Boston – might playfully tease each other about their different food preferences, favorite sports teams, and distinct ways of speaking.

With advertising, backstories aren’t between just a few people; rather there’s common knowledge and shared experiences among people regionally, nationally, or even globally, some of which are positive and others, negative. Advertisers should be especially sensitive to the latter.

At some point in their lives, most people probably have had someone comment on the way they talk, perhaps in a complimentary way or maybe critically. However, some people endure daily comments about their accents that often turn into ridicule and even racism. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to find examples of such verbal abuse online, like the following:

Terry Nguyen is an effective writer, but she thinks twice before speaking because she sometimes mispronounces words, which came from growing a home with two Vietnamese parents who spoke rough English.
Sharada Vishwanath tells the story of a classmate imitating her Indian accent, which began as lighthearted and fun but quickly changed to annoying and offensive, as the agitator mentioned the words curry and cheaper.

Belittling people because of the way they talk can be “linguistic racism,” which in work environments may cause those targeted to refrain from speaking and to miss opportunities for professional advancement.

So, do the commercials mentioned at the onset represent linguistic racism? Possibly. An important distinction is whether depictions are of race vs. ethnicity vs. nationality. Another issue is that not all accent imitation is the same – as mentioned earlier, the interpretation of any communication is partly a function of the backstory, or broader context.

Historically, in many English-speaking western nations, people of color from places like Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been the recipients of far more accent abuse than Europeans whose first language is not English. For Terry and Shandra, mentioned above, criticism of their speaking is not a one-off experience but a regular occurrence.

Over the past century, television shows and movies have cast Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American actors and often had them speak broken and improper English, which has contributed to shameful stereotypes of people of color being less intelligent and more socially inept.

One common troupe is that of an Asian who adds “ee” to the ends of words (e.g., “talkee”), omits definite articles (e.g., this, that), and replaces L’s with R’s (e.g. Herro instead of Hello). In one of its final scenes, the classic Christmas movie A Christmas Story employs this Asian stereotyping.

Indians are also frequently stereotyped for a particular style of English speaking. Such accent mocking is what led The Office’s Kelly Kapoor in Season 1 to slap her bigoted boss Michael Scott. For decades, the animated TV show The Simpsons lampooned Indians through its reoccurring character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, until he was finally removed from the show in 2017. Imitation of Indian accents is so common that there is a word for it – brown voice.

Ridicule is bad enough, but “At worst, linguistic racism can lead to deprivation in education, employment, health and housing,” as benefits and opportunities are sometimes withheld from those who talk differently. Perpetuating negative perceptions easily leads to social stigmas that carry significant physical and economic consequences.

However, mockery of the accents of French, Dutch, Germans, and other Europeans who are not native English speakers is not only much less common, when comments about their accents are offered, they usually take on a different tenor. Their speech is more often complimented as sounding cute, sexy, or sophisticated, whereas that of Asians and Indians tends to be criticized for grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes.

So, does this asymmetry in experience make it acceptable to mock Europeans’ accents? I’d like to offer three reasons why it does not:

1. People are still hurt. Isabelle Duff, a native of Ireland whose job took her to London, recounts how she often felt harassed by coworkers who continually imitated her Irish accent. Scottish actor Billy Boyd, who played “Pippin” in Lord of the Rings, refuses roles, common in scripts, that call for an incomprehensible Scottish accent, which is an unfair and demeaning stereotype of Scots. A similar example is the unintelligible babble of Sesame Street’s Swedish Chef, who many Swedes don’t find funny.

2. Wrong for one should mean wrong for all. There aren’t many examples in ethics where compelling cases can be made that it’s okay to harm certain groups of people, but not others. A proponent of capital punishment might argue it’s right to execute murders but not others; however, murders aren’t a distinct, demographically identifiable people group. Also, unlike Scots, Irish, and Swedes, murderers have done things that arguably warrant differential treatment.

3. Don’t imply permission. People expect consistency. If a parent tells one child they can stay up late, their sibling will expect the same privilege. So, if it’s acceptable to mock Scots, some people will deduce that it’s okay to mock Indians too. The safest approach is to not offer any basis for making that inference by maintaining that it’s inappropriate to mock the speech of any people group.

When we open our mouths to speak, funny things sometimes come out. It’s okay to laugh about those silly sounds and statements with people we know, in the right context, and with pure intent.

However, the standards that fit individual incidences cannot be morally stretched to cover broad cases involving the accents of entire people groups. Although it may seem funny and be effective, advertising that mocks the speech of any race, ethnicity, or other demographic should be considered “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Does Selling Love Risk Relationships?

6/4/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

Love, exciting and new . . . come aboard, we’re expecting you. Those lyrics from one of the most popular TV sitcoms of the 1970s – ABC’s The Love Boat – are a reminder that people have long-been fascinated with others’ romances. Offering entertainment that people enjoy is a good thing, but are new marketing strategies for monetizing love courting immorality?

A former student of mine, Kaylee Enck, recently messaged me to ask my opinion about a rom-com. I’m not the best person for questions about romantic cinema, but Kaylee wasn’t really interested in my perspective on the movie, Anyone But You; she wanted to know my thoughts about a very unconventional tactic used to promote the film, as she explained:

“The movie went viral because everyone thought the two leads had fallen in love with each other off-screen---even though both were in serious, committed relationships with other people at the time. They played the ruse really well. It's hard to know if it was the pretend relationship or something else, but the male lead's real-life finance actually called off their engagement. A few days ago, it was revealed that the whole thing was a marketing ploy invented by Sydney Sweeney, the lead actress and an executive producer on the film.”

With Kaylee’s clear event summary and some additional background from a link she provided, I was glad to offer my perspective:

Thank you for sharing this story. It seems like a very lowly strategy both because of the wide-spread intentional deceit and the negative impact on real relationships. As I think of broader issues involved, the strategy may reflect a growing tendency to put work ahead of the people in our lives and a willingness to do anything for money or fame.

Kaylee thanked me for my reply, and we could have been done there, but her question got me thinking . . . the markets for products related to love are many and huge! Besides certain movies genres, there are dozens of other products that are often, if not always, connected to love, for instance:

Television shows: old ones e.g., the Love Boat, the Dating Game, soap operas, and new ones e.g., 90-Day Fiancé, the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Golden Bachelor, Love Island
Plays/musicals
Songs: so much music has been written about love
Books: romance novels
Dating apps
Greeting cards
Flowers
Candy
Romantic dinners
Jewelry: particularly engagement rings and wedding rings
Clothing: wedding apparel, lingerie
Wedding venues
Wedding photography
Honeymoons
Perfume and cologne
Toothpaste and mouthwash
Teeth whitening
Makeup
Hair and skincare products
Cosmetic surgery

There are likely more, but this is at least a good start for a list that can be categorized in several different ways e.g., goods vs. services, romantic love vs. friendship love. Another way to slice it is products that offer a direct, personal love benefit vs. a vicarious one i.e., enjoying someone else’s love experience. Dating apps and wedding rings are the former, while rom-coms and romance novels are the latter.

Is one of these value propositions (direct or vicarious) more moral than the other? Probably not. Just as it’s great that resorts offer honeymoon vacation packages for newlyweds, it’s nice that people who enjoy romance novels can read about couples going on their honeymoons. Buyers and sellers of both benefit without anything being inherently unethical.

Then, what’s wrong with a business model based on love?

That’s not a rhetorical question – There are, unfortunately, many specific ways such a model can be misappropriated, but the general downfall is when profit takes precedent over people and individuals are injured physically, emotionally, or relationally.

Sometimes called “the oldest profession,” prostitution is the classic example of such harm and the reason why historically most societies have considered harlotry immoral. Even if there are two ostensibly willing parties, this selling of “love” causes relational harm to family members of those involved in the act, as well as broader harm to the family as a societal institution.

Movie and TV show sex scenes are another example of potential harm. Even if camera angles and editing suggest more to physical intimacy than actually occurs, the actors involved in the loveless, commitment-less contact expose themselves to what may be lasting emotional harm, as Nedra Gallegos, an instructor at the Los Angeles Campus of the New York Film Academy, implies: “The narrative may be fictional, but the contact is real.”

Unlike the previous two examples, the issue with Anyone But You was not overtly sex but rather the costars putting the success of their movie ahead of their own real relationships/significant others. In this instance, the relational harm was direct, as suggested by the breakup of actor Glen Powell and his girlfriend Gigi Paris.

I'd shared with Kaylee my opinion of the movie’s marketing tactics, but I really wanted to hear hers, since she’s a communications and marketing professional who knows more about the rom-com genre than I do. Here’s her perspective, which is influenced by her Christian faith:

“What marketing really boils down to providing value to the consumer. What is more valuable to us as humans than love, though? When tapping into that sacred emotion, one has to do so cautiously, because no matter how hard we try, no product/service we offer can actually bring someone lasting love---only our relationships, especially our relationship with Christ, can provide that. Transparent, honest advertising, even if not as monetarily successful in the here-and-now, will always win out in the end.”

Her admonitions for transparency and not allowing anything to replace real relationships are great ones for everyone. Coincidentally, they are also consistent with some other Love Boat theme song lyrics that identify love as “life’s sweetest reward,” and that prioritize love that “won't hurt anymore.”

There are good ways that marketing can help start, strengthen, and celebrate real relationships, as well as provide edifying relationship-focused entertainment. However, even effective strategies that place profit ahead of people are “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Questions are the Key to AI and Ethics

5/3/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

New technology has enabled people to do previously unimaginable things: mass-produce books, illuminate homes, communicate across continents, fly through the air. As amazing as these advances were, artificial intelligence (AI) offers an even more incredible ability, one on which humans have held a uniquely strong hold – thought.

Allowing AI to drive information gathering, analysis, and even creativity can be very helpful, but without a heavy human hand on the wheel, is society on a collision course to moral collapse? Avoiding such an outcome will involve many intentional actions; a main one must be asking the right questions.

People sometimes ask me the question, “Did you always want to be a teacher/professor?” My answer is easy, “Absolutely not.” For most of my early life I was terrified of public speaking.

However, I’ve always had one trait that serves educators well – curiosity. Even at a young age, I was very inquisitive, often wanting to know how and why. I remember one day, when I was four or five my loving mother, fatigued by all my inquiries, exclaimed with some exacerbation, “David, you ask so many questions!”

Curiosity has served me well in business roles and in higher education, where I tell my students asking good questions is one of the best skills they can develop. Among other things, the right questions clarify needs and spur creative solutions. Questions are also critical for challenging potential immorality.

Effective use of AI often depends on a person’s ability to ask the right question of the appropriate app. Those inquiries can involve literal questions, e.g., asking ChatGPT, “Who is the best target market for gardening tools?” Questions also can be framed as commands, e.g., if someone wants to know what an eye-catching image for a gardening blog might be, they ask Midjourney to complete a specific task, “Create an image about gardening tomatoes.”

It was a question I heard while watching Bloomberg business one February many years ago that helped inspire me to write about ethical issues in marketing. As the two program anchors bantered about the recent Super Bowl, they asked each other, “Which commercial did you like best?” Each answered, “the one with the little blue pill,” which both thought was for Viagra. Unfortunately, their recall wasn’t close; it was a Fiat ad.

If a company spends $7 million on 30 seconds of airtime, they should want to know: “Was the ad effective?” Also, given that 123.7 million people, or more than a third of the U.S. population, ranging from four-year-olds to ninety-four-year-olds, watched the last Super Bowl, everyone should be asking, “Are the ads ethical?” Those two questions create the four quadrants of the Mindful Matrix, a tool that many have used to frame moral questions in the field.

It’s been almost seven years since I first asked questions about the ethics of AI. Business Insider published the article in which I posed four questions about artificial intelligence:

Whose moral standards should be used?
Can machines converse about moral issues?
Can algorithms take context into account?
Who should be accountable?

I didn’t know very much about AI then, and I’m still learning, but as I look back at the questions now, it seems they’ve aged pretty well. Those four queries have led me to ask many more AI-related ethics questions, which I’ve posed in nearly a dozen Mindful Marketing articles over recent years, for instance:

I’ve also gone directly to the source and asked AI questions about AI ethics. More than once, I spent hours peppering ChatGPT with ethics-related inquiries. During one lengthy conversation the chatbot conceded that “AI alone should not be relied upon to make ethical decisions” and that “AI does not have the ability to understand complex moral and ethical issues that arise in decision-making.”

ChatGPT’s self-awareness proved accurate when just a few weeks later I again engaged in an extended conversation with the chatbot, asking it to create text for a sponsored post about paper towels for Facebook and to make it look like an ordinary person’s post rather than an ad. My request to create a native ad would give many marketers moral pause, but the chatbot didn’t blink; instead, it readily obliged with some enticing and deceptive copy.

These experiences have led me to wonder:

Even if AI is able to answer some ethical questions, who will ask ethical questions?

Over the years, many people have asked me questions about ethical issues. A few months ago, I wrote about an undergraduate student of mine, “Grant,” who asked me about an ethical issue in his internship. His company wanted to create fake customers who could pose questions related to products it wanted to promote.

On the other end of the higher ed spectrum, I recently served on the dissertation committee of a doctoral student who asked me to help her answer a question related to my earlier exchange with ChatGPT, “Does recognition matter in evaluating the ethics of native advertising?” Turns out, it does.

Business practitioners also have often asked me about ethical issues. One particularly memorable question came from a building supply company where male construction workers would sometimes enter the store without shirts, making female employees and others uncomfortable. I suggested some low-key strategies to encourage the men to dress more decently.

I’ve also had opportunities to answer journalists’ questions about moral issues in marketing, such as:

Do Barbie dolls positively impact body image? The New York Times
How can toys be more accessible? National Public Radio
Is pay-day lending moral? U.S. News & World Report
Should sports teams have people as mascots? WTOP Radio, Washington, DC
Are fantasy sports ads promising unrealistic outcomes? The Boston Globe

And, in my own marketing work, I’ve sometimes encountered ethical questions, such as during a recent nonprofit board meeting. We were brainstorming attention-grabbing titles for an upcoming conference, when one member somewhat jokingly suggested including the F word. Fortunately, the idea didn’t gain traction, as others indirectly answered ‘No’ to the question, “Is it right to promote a conference with an expletive?”

These experiences, along with my research and writing, lead me to conclude that people are who we can depend on to ask important ethical questions, not AI.

So, if it’s up to us, not machines, to be the flag bearers of morality, what should we be wondering about AI ethics? Here are 12 important questions marketers should be asking:

1) Ownership: Are we properly compensating property owners?
Late last year, the New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and ChatGPT, alleging that the defendants’ large language models trained on NYT’s articles, constituting “unlawful copying and use.” Now eight more newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, have done the same.

2) Attribution: Are we giving due credit to the creator?
In cases in which creators give permission for their work to be used for free, they still should be cited or otherwise acknowledged – something that AI is notorious for neglecting or even worse, fabricating.

3) Employment: What’s AI’s impact on people’s work?
In one survey, 37% of business leaders reported that AI replaced human workers in 2023. It’s not the responsibility of marketing or any other field to guarantee full employment; however, socially minded companies can look to retrain AI-impacted employees so they can use the technology to “amplify” their skills and increase their organizational utility.

4) Accuracy: Is the information we’re sharing correct?
Many of us have learned from experience that the answers AI gives are sometimes incorrect. However, seeing these outcomes as much more than an inconvenience, delegates to the World Economic Forum (WEF), held annually in Davos, Switzerland, recently declared that AI-driven misinformation represented “the world’s biggest short-term threat.”

5) Deception: Are we leading people to believe an untruth?
Inaccurate information can be unintentional. Other times, there’s a desire to deceive, which AI makes even easier to do. Deepfakes, like the one used recently to replicate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will become increasingly hard to detect unless marketers and others call for stricter standards.

6) Transparency: Are we informing people when we’re using AI?
There are times, again, when AI use can be very helpful. However, in those instances, those using AI should clearly communicate its role. Google sees the value in such identification as it will now require users in its Merchant Center to indicate if images were generated by AI.

7) Privacy: Are we protecting people’s personal information?
I recently asked ChatGPT if it could find a conversation I had previously with the bot. It replied, “I don’t have the ability to recall or retain past conversations with users due to privacy and security policies.” That response was reassuring; yet, many of us likely agree that “Since this technology is still so new, we don’t know what happens to the data that is being fed into the chat.” Is there really such a thing as a private conversation with AI?

8) Bias: Are we promoting bias, e.g., racial, gender, search?
For several years, there’s been concern that AI-driven facial recognition fails to give fair treatment to people with dark skin. Women also are sometimes targets of AI bias such as when searches for topics like puberty and menopause overwhelming return negative images of women.

9) Relationships: Are we encouraging AI as a relationship substitute?
Businesses like dating apps, social media, and even restaurants can assist people in filling needs for love and belonging. However, certain AI applications aim to replace humans in relationships entirely. After talking with a 24-year-old single man who spends $10,000/month on AI girlfriends, one tech executive believes the virtual-significant-other industry will soon birth a $1 billion company.

10) Skills: How will AI impact creativity and critical thinking?
The title of a recent Wall Street Journal article read, “Business Schools Are Going All In on AI.” It’s important that future business leaders understand and learn to use the new technology, but there also naturally should be some concern, e.g., When it’s so easy to ask Lavender to draft an email, will already diminishing writing skills continue to decline? Or, with the availability of Midjourney to easily produce attractive images, will skills in photography and graphic design suffer?

11) Stewardship: Are we using resources efficiently?
Some say AI’s biggest threat is not immediate but an evolving one related to energy consumption. Rene Haas, CEO of Arm Holdings, a British semiconductor and software design company, warns that within seven years, AI data centers could require as much as 25% of all available power, overwhelming power grids.

12) Indecency: Are we promoting crudeness, vulgarity, or obscenity?
For many people, AI’s impact on standards for decency may be the least of concerns; however, it also may be the moral issue that needs the most human input. An AI engineer at Microsoft intervened recently by writing a letter to the Federal Trade Commission expressing his concerns about Copilot’s unseemly image generation. As a result, the company now blocks certain terms that produced violent, sexual images.

Microsoft’s efforts to uphold decency remind me of something my father would do for our family’s promotional products company forty or fifty years ago. Long before the Internet, let alone AI, most major calendar manufacturers included a few wall calendars in their lines that objectified women by showing them wearing little or nothing, strewn across the hoods of cars or in other dehumanizing poses.

So, each year when the calendar catalogs arrived, before giving them to the salespeople, my dad would cut-to-size large decal pieces and paste them over every page of the soft porn pictures. Some customers paging through the catalogs and seeing the pasted-over pages would ask, “What’s under this?” to which my dad would answer, “That’s something we’re not going to sell.”

Long before the customers had asked their question, my father had asked his own question, “Is it right to sell calendars that oversexualize and objectify women?” and answered it “No.” Hopefully, fifty years from now, regardless the role of AI, there will still be people thoughtful and concerned enough to ask ethical questions.

To hold ourselves and AI morally accountable, we don’t need to have all the answers. We do, though, need to be thoughtful and courageous enough to ask the right questions, including, the most basic one “Is this something we should be doing?” Asking questions is key to Mindful Marketing.

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Has Gatorade Diluted its Brand?

4/1/2024

1 Comment

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

For companies thirsting for earnings, new product lines and brand extensions are often great sources of cash flow. The world’s foremost sports drinks maker has won with such strategies for decades, but does adding bottled water to its product mix develop or dilute Gatorade’s iconic brand?

Over the last 10 years, the market for sports and exercise-related rehydration has burst open. Dozens of companies have added new pre- and post-workout drinks infused with everything from electrolytes, to minerals, to protein. Among the leading competitors are Body Armor, Powerade, PRIME, and Electrolit.

Still, in the saturated sports drink market, Gatorade’s annual revenue of $7 billion represents five times the sales of its closest competitor. Much of that success comes from the company’s skill in creating new products labeled with its valuable Gatorade name. Among its branded offerings in the sports drink category are:

Gatorade Thirst Quenchers
Gatorade Zero Sugar Thirst Quenchers
Gatorade Thirst Quencher Powder Packets
Gatorade Electrolyte Beverages
Gatorade Fit Electrolyte Beverages
Gatorade Protein Shakes

In addition, the company has attached its world-renowned name to a number of non-liquid, or solid, goods including:

Gatorade Protein Bars
Gatorade Sports Bottles
Gatorade Shaker Bottles
Gatorade Sports Towels
Gatorade Bottle Carriers
Gatorade Bottle Carts
Gatorade Ice Chests
Gatorade Coolers
Gatorade Cups

Despite all the hydration help Gatorade has offered athletes and others since its invention at the University of Florida in 1965, the company hasn’t had a Gatorade-named offering in the most basic thirst-quenching category – water.

The global market for bottled water is already voluminous and is expected keep growing: Some estimated it to represent $302 billion in revenue in 2022 and anticipate an increase to over $503 by 2032.

Why wouldn’t Gatorade want to take a sip of those sales? Plus, Gatorade’s parent company, PepsiCo, is familiar with bottled water, producing the very successful brand Aquafina. Its annual U.S. revenue of $1.3 billion make it the best-selling non-private-label brand water in the nation.

So, given the massive market opportunity and the company’s great familiarity with food and beverages, it seems to make sense for Gatorade to lean again on its staple strategy of brand extension. But by naming the new entry “Gatorade Water,” has the company gone to the well once too often?

There were some good reasons that PepsiCo called its bottled water Aquafina and not Pepsi Water. First, Aquafina is a creative name that evokes relevant positive perceptions for the brand. Perhaps more important, though, Pepsi Water would be a branding oxymoron – a contradiction in terms and problem for value proposition perceptions.

When people hear “Pepsi,” they probably think of words like cola, soda, sweet, fizzy, and caffeine. They might also associate Pepsi with parties, special occasions, and splurging. All of these adjectives and nouns are pretty much the opposite of what most people associate with water.

The same perceptual disconnect likely exists between water and Gatorade. When people hear “Gatorade,” they probably think salty, sugary, energy, and colorful (yellow/green, blue, red). Again, words that are pretty much the opposite of water.

H2O was around before human beings were. Ever since, people have been hydrating rather successfully with water. Still, researchers at the University of Florida created Gatorade because they believed they had improved on the classic element by developing “a drink that contained salts and sugars that could be absorbed more quickly [than water].”

Since its invention, Gatorade’s unique value proposition has been its relative advantage over water, as the sports drink’s development affirms:
“Drawing on research into rehydration, the team developed an electrolyte-carbohydrate solution, a mix of salts and sugars designed to provide the athletes with energy and necessary chemicals for physical and mental performance. Plain water could not move through the body quickly enough, nor restore its chemistry.”

So, Gatorade Water should make one wonder, “If water works, is traditional Gatorade really necessary?” Or, the new product may create the cognitive dissonance for consumers suggested above and lead to the philosophical question: “What exactly is Gatorade?”

To be fair, Gatorade Water isn’t just H2O. It also contains electrolytes, but the company’s own website suggests the purpose isn’t performance, rather its water is “electrolyte infused for great taste.”

To avoid possible brand confusion, marketers might suggest that PepsiCo should have used individual branding, which gives significantly different product lines their own branding, rather than family branding, which puts the family name on all a company’s products.

Apple is a great example of family branding: It leverages its highly esteemed name and graphic icon for its AirPods, MacBooks, and iPhones, among other products. In contrast, Procter & Gamble (P&G) may be the biggest consumer products company that most consumers don’t recognize because it individually brands its products, including Pampers, Bounce, Downy, Tide, Bounty, Gillette, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, and Old Spice.

Should PepsiCo have individually branded its sports water instead of family branding it? Actually, the company already tried the individual branding strategy, which is why there’s Propel.

Propel is an individually branded PepsiCo line of “fitness water” that contains vitamins B3, B5, B6, C and E. What makes its branding even more interesting, if not confusing, is that Propel is also infused with “Gatorade Electrolytes.”

Gatorade in Propel represents another branding strategy – ingredient branding. It’s what Duncan Hines uses when it promotes that its cake mixes contain Hershey’s syrup, or what Dell uses when it says its laptops have Intel chips inside them.

Ingredient branding is a very viable branding strategy, but in the case of PepsiCo, it just ads to the bottled water brand confusion. For instance, it may be clear why some consumers would choose Propel instead of Aquafina, but why would they chose Gatorade over Propel when Propel ‘contains Gatorade’?

It seems like its countervailing branding strategies have set up PepsiCo to be an example of another not-so-favorable marketing concept, cannibalization, which is when a corporation’s own brands compete with each other more than they do with the brands of other companies. General Motors experienced this problem many decades ago with brands like Buick and Oldsmobile.

Gatorade is one of the world’s most highly regarded brands in any category, especially in hydration. However, on this particular play-call, the sports drink icon and its parent PepsiCo seem to have dropped the ball. Though well-intentioned, ‘video evidence’ will likely later confirm that Gatorade Water was “Simple-Minded Marketing.”

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Getting Marketing Decency Done

3/3/2024

14 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

“When is it okay to swear in an ad?” This headline from one of my favorite marketing publications surprised me as I thought, ‘Isn’t the answer obvious?’ The article’s lead-in question was a quick reminder, though, that everyone’s not on the same page for many communication tactics, including the use of profanity, which may spell trouble for marketers and many others.

Discussions of ethics sometimes identify actions considered blatant wrongs, e.g., it’s never right to murder or rape. Other actions like lying and stealing elicit less unanimity, mainly because it’s possible to point to circumstances in which they might be okay, for instance:

Lying to protect a friend from physical harm
Stealing food to save starving family members

There probably always have been diverse perspectives about swearing; however, over the past several years, maybe because of social media or other factors, opinions about cursing appear to be coalescing: More people seem okay with the use of profane language.

One prominent recent example reflecting a broadening tolerance of curse words is the edgy slogan adopted by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: “Get sh_t done.” Shapiro certainly is not the first politician to employ profanity; although, his formalization of it as a political slogan is rather unique.

Politicians are far from the only professionals who have seen their vocabulary become more curse-word-inclusive. A 2016 study found that compared to other industries, healthcare workers used the most expletives. Also surprising, another study identified individuals in accounting, banking, and finance as the most foul-mouthed professionals.

Maybe the saying, ‘swears like a sailor’ will give way to ‘cusses like a comptroller.’

A 2023 study that surveyed 1,500 residents of the 30 largest metropolitan areas about their swearing habits found that respondents swore an average of 21 times a day, with men swearing more than women, Gen Zs swearing more than Baby Boomers, and people in Columbus, OH swearing more than those in any other U.S. city.

These studies and their statistics are eye-opening for me. I don’t encounter much swearing in my day-to-day, but I’m realizing that many other people do. From a recent personal experience, I also know the field of marketing isn’t immune.

I was meeting with a group of marketing professionals who wanted to create an attention-grabbing title for a coming event. As we brainstormed ideas, someone suggested a full-out profanity approach: “Get the f-ing most out of your marketing.” The suggestion, which was somewhat serious, received brief consideration from the group before dismissing it as too edgy and risky for branding.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that a marketer would write an article asking when it is and isn’t okay to swear in an ad.

Over the years, I’ve taken a rather hard stance against the use of profanity in marketing, arguing back in 2017 that swearing can damage one’s personal brand and in 2021 that it can be harmful to others’ mental health.

Given the study statistics and findings referenced above and other signs of increased swearing, my hot take on the use of crude language hasn’t aged well! Still, I’m not ready to back down.

Like most people, I’ve said and written things that in retrospect I’d retract or reframe; however, those two articles aren’t among them. After rereading each piece, I believe their arguments are still sound, and I encourage others to read them.

I can't add a lot more to my case for countering cursing, but I would like to introduce one additional thought by asking a question:

What will be the cumulative effect of increased profanity and its ultimate impact?

To try to answer that question, a metaphor may help. A few years ago my wife and I decided to try eating more vegetables and less meat, which unexpectedly turned into vegetarianism. When people ask why I’ve chosen such a diet, I tell them that while I appreciate other reasons, the main one driving my eating behavior is sustainability.

From the documentaries I’ve watched and articles I’ve read, it’s very difficult for our world to support current levels of livestock and poultry production, and it’s impossible for our planet to provide a meat-centric diet to billions more people. Such a future is not sustainable.

Does one person eating black bean burgers instead of beef burgers make a difference? Not really, but it’s about offering a small contribution to the cumulative positive effect. An individual eating more vegetables and less meat alongside similar diets of millions or billions of other humans does make a difference and will produce a positive impact for our world.

I have to admit, suggesting that swearing is unsustainable sounds kind of silly at first. After all, all words, including curse words, are in infinite supply. However, projecting forward the trend of ever-increasing cursing, it's not hard to imagine some pretty unpalatable norms, for instance:

Doctors and patients swearing at each other during healthcare visits
Profane language becoming common at graduations, wedding ceremonies, and funeral services.
Three and four-year-olds using the f-word in conversations with their parents and others

For some, a loss of decency and decorum may not matter. Some might even prefer a culture characterized by crudeness.

Others might rationalize that normalizing swear words would be a good thing because then they’d no longer be offensive. It is true that over time some words once considered bad, like “bloody” and “bugger,” stop being shunned, but new swear words always emerge. Moreover, there’s another potentially greater problem.

Individuals who suggest benefits of cursing tend to offer two basic arguments: 1) it helps the swearer in some way (e.g., by allowing them to off steam), and 2) it builds social bonds between the swearer and others (e.g., by showing their real self to others).

Perhaps there’s some truth to these arguments, but they probably only hold true if it’s swearing about something and not swearing at someone. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the first use easily leads to the second, and when people start cursing at others, situations rapidly degenerate.

Think of social media altercations, sports fights, and road rage. Most of us have probably heard or read of situations in which conflicts intensified then went off the rails after one person swore at another or otherwise flipped them off.

Are people capable of compartmentalizing their cursing and swearing about things that happen to them but not swear at others? Most people probably can. However, in a world that desperately needs to dial back both individual and organizational conflicts, is it worth the risk to further normalize the behavior?

Advertising is one of the world’s most pervasive and influential forms of communication. One ad with a single curse word won’t make much difference, but like one person eating less meat and more vegetables, it’s about the cumulative effect: If more and more advertising includes curse words, more people will follow suit, and some will not separate swearing about things from swearing at people.

In short, profanity-laced promotion is not sustainable.

Those who work in advertising are some of the brightest and most creative people on the planet. Most are very capable of crafting engaging and effective strategies that don’t use swear words, which is why including profanity in ads is “Mindless Marketing.”

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Should Highway Signs be Hilarious?

2/4/2024

51 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

Where do you go for a good laugh – TikTok, a favorite podcast, late-night TV monologues? How about highway signs? Some states have turned to wisecracking signage to engage drivers with traffic messages, but not everyone is laughing.

You might think that those who manage and maintain the nation's roads and highways have little need for marketing, but they do. Although they may not be exchanging physical products, they want drivers to embrace ideas that might influence their actions, including messages with important information like:

Vehicle crashes
Road closures and detours
Inclement weather warnings
Dangerous road conditions
Safety recommendations
Amber/Silver Alerts

Unfortunately, whether people are sitting on a sofa or driving in an SUV, they often ignore and or/dismiss all kinds of promotional messages, which is why many advertisers go to great creative lengths to make their ads stand out. Some creators of highway signs have adopted a similar strategy.

There’s not much that can be done creatively with boxy LED letters on a black background, but humor is one amendable approach. Here are examples of highway signs aimed at hilarity:

Visiting in-laws? Slow down, get there late
Four I’s in Mississippi. Two eyes on the road
100 is the temperature not the speed limit
Slow down you must. May the fourth be with you
Hocus pocus, drive with focus
Buckle up. Windshields hurt
Jingle bells, speeding kills, buckle up today
Don’t be a grinch, let them merge
You’re not a firework. Don’t drive lit
Use Yah Blinkah

Such signs make many people chuckle, but one organization standing for seriousness is the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the U.S. Department of Transportation agency that “provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the nation's highways, bridges and tunnels” while also helping state and local governments enhance mobility, safety, and innovation.

This past December, the FHWA published the 11th edition of its “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways.” In Section 2L.07, page 519 of the 1161-page compendium, the agency outlined a variety of specific ways aimed at making traffic messages safer:

“A CMS [changeable message sign] should not be used to display a traffic safety campaign message if doing so could adversely affect respect for the sign. Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand.”

The FHWA has good reason for wanting serious signs. Given that most people casually assume their safety on roadways, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of driving’s inherent danger, including that a person is much more likely be killed in a car accident than in a commercial airline accident.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2022. Furthermore, a leading cause of traffic accidents is distracted driving, which could result from many things, including roadside signage.

Despite my decades of driving experience, I’m no expert on road signs, so I reached out to a few people in my home state of Pennsylvania who are well-qualified to address the FHWA’s new guidelines. Together their agencies wield significant influence over the roads and highways in the nation’s fifth most populous state.

It’s hard to consider roadways in the commonwealth without including the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “America’s first superhighway.” Responsible for operating and improving its more than 550 miles of roadway is the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (PTC). Two of its key leaders, CEO Mark Compton and Director of Traffic Engineering & Operations Tom Macchione, shared with me the PTC’s priorities related to roadside signage.

The FHWA’s new sign guidelines should pose little difficulty for the PTC, which already adheres closely to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) for CMS. More specifically, the PTC upholds Section 1D.01, p. 31 of the manual’s 11th edition, which requires that traffic control devices:

Fulfill a need
Command attention
Convey a clear, simple meaning
Command respect from road users
Give adequate time for proper response

Although the PTC realizes that unconventional messages on CMS may be well-intentioned, it holds that they do not meet the preceding criteria, and adds:

“It has been shown that inappropriate or excessive use of a traffic control device such as a CMS can diminish its effectiveness. There is no objective evidence that the use of unconventional messages on CMS have any greater effect on driver behavior than conventional sign messages. Additionally, the use of unconventional messages have the potential to result in additional time and attention on the message when not understood by the driver, resulting in an increased safety risk.”

For these reasons, the PTC avoids humorous CMS messages and instead uses standard MUTCD-approved traffic safety messages. Consistency is a priority for the PTC, which works hard to comply with both federal and state requirements for signs. The source of the latter guidelines is mainly the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, or PennDOT.

I reached out to PennDOT Safety Press Officer Fritzi Schreffler, who was happy to weigh in on the recent roadway signage debate. She prefaced that she’d share her personal perspective, which veered somewhat from a more conventional approach.

Schreffler has long been a vocal advocate for nonstandard messages on road signs, as over the years she’s seen many examples of drivers not noticing or ignoring routine signage even after passing it repeatedly. In contrast, she believes humorous messages like “Use ya blinkah” can be effective.

One such PennDOT safety message she identified, “Don't drive star-spangled hammered,” generated significant buzz (no pun intended) across the state. Schreffler suggested there’s great value in messages like that one that stay top-of-mind for drivers, as she reasoned, “If people are talking about the signs, isn’t that a good thing?”

Perhaps the group of people that deals most often and directly with drivers’ reactions to roadway signs is the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP). Although the PSP does not create or maintain CMS signs, its troopers see the signs’ impact firsthand.

A member of the PSP since 2006, Lieutenant Adam Reed is the PSP’s Communications Office Director. Like Schreffler, Reed was glad to offer his personal perspective on roadway signs. He said he’s found that people sometimes do respond to non-traffic control messages, such as “Buckle-Up.” However, he cautioned about giving drivers multiple things to process, and for that reason he appreciates the FHWA’s desire to keep messages simple.

Reed suggested that such simplicity is especially important during inclement weather when drivers have even more to manage and reaction time is especially critical: “Less information to process is usually better and safer.”

However, Reed also recognizes that humor in messages sometimes makes them easier to remember, consequently, he can understand agencies wanting to lean into levity. He added that messages about not driving impaired or distracted can be very helpful, provided that people remember them, and that the PSP is always interested in effective messages.

It’s interesting that among these four very knowledgeable individuals who represent three highly vested stakeholder groups there doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus about content for roadside signage; rather their perspectives touched many points on the spectrum from CMS being simple and direct to signs being humorous and perhaps more memorable.

At first glance, this disparity of opinion may be disconcerting, as some may reason that there will be a breakdown in driving in PA if these influential people are not on exactly the same page. However, the fact that these individuals have some differences in perspectives may be a very good thing.

One big benefit of such diversity of opinion is that it can avoid groupthink, or “reaching a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the consequences or alternatives.” Each individual I interviewed held their own well-reasoned perspective that they clearly articulated for me, and I’m sure they would do the same for others.

At the same time and perhaps even more important, all of these key stakeholders recognized that others have different opinions that also have certain merit, and even if they disagree with those perspectives, they can still respect them and dialogue civilly about the differences.

These two attributes are integral to most successful organizations: It’s very helpful to have individuals and departments that bring different perspectives, including creative vision and risk assessment. It’s also important that the disparate groups can, despite their differences, work together toward a common goal. Marketing firms can especially benefit from this kind of healthy dissidence.

Of course, at some point, decisions need to be made and actions taken, which is what the FHWA’s new manual has done. The consistency it provides for signage within and across state lines should be helpful, even if there are some differences in interpretation and implementation of those guidelines.

Having been fortunate to engage in the conversations above, my own opinion on CMS content is still evolving. Just during the time I’ve been writing this article, I encountered one sign with the straightforward weather-related message: “Dense fog ahead. Use caution.” I was glad that I and other drivers could see that warning.

Meanwhile, as a marketing professor who has studied playful teasing in advertising and who often uses humor in teaching, I appreciate how effective humor can be in gaining attention and boosting memory.

It may be idealistic, but my hope is that the debate about FHWA’s new road sign guidelines will lead to the formation of a ‘middle lane’ that has room for both types of messages without sacrificing driver safety. With so many smart and creative people attuned to this issue, someone will likely find a solution that integrates both sets of benefits.

Clear, singular direction is nice when it’s available. Sometimes, however, life presents competing options, each with attractive features. In such situations, it’s possible that two different approaches both can be “Mindful Marketing.”

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51 Comments

What a Mouse Can Teach Us About Morality

1/8/2024

11 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

It’s interesting that among the billions of people born into this world, most seem to learn the same first words: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “No,” and “Mine!” Protecting one’s own property and respecting others’ property are crucial for a functioning society, so when a near century old copyright expires on a cartoon mouse, should anyone be free to use it however they want?

Steamboat Wille, the 1928 animated short film by Disney founder and namesake Walt Disney and animator/cartoonist Ub Iwerks, entered the public domain this past January 1, which means that after 95 years, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse is now “free for all to copy, share, and build upon.”

It’s no surprise that on a planet full of creative and entrepreneurial people, wheels were already turning before public domain day 2024 toward ways of monetizing the newly liberated mouse. Some of those ways would probably make Walt shudder.

One company has announced a violence-filled video game featuring Mickey, while a movie producer/director is planning a Steamboat Willie horror film. Both beg the question:

Is it right to turn Mickey Mouse into a slasher?

Such as question may make some wonder – Doesn’t the Walt Disney Company have a say in this? Can’t the “happiest place on earth” stop someone from making a maniacal Mickey?

To understand Disney’s control over Mickey Mouse, it’s important to distinguish two related but sometimes conflated intellectual property terms: copyrights and trademarks.

Copyrights – Protect “original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression,” which means in a fairly permanent way, such as by writing it down, recording it, or taking a picture of it. To be protected, works must possess some minimal amount of creativity. Included are things like poems, musical compositions, books, photos, paintings, blog posts, computer programs, and movies.

The length of copyright protection varies. In general, works created before January 1, 1978, have protection for 95 years, while those created on or after the same date are protected for the lifetime of the author/creator plus 70 years.

Like other works created in 1928, Steamboat Willie’s copyright expired after 95 years and entered the public domain on January 1, 2024.

Trademarks – Are words, phrases, designs, symbols, or some combination thereof, used to differentiate one company’s goods from others in the same category. The more creative and unique a trademark, the better protection it affords.

Anyone can place a “TM” next to a special graphic or phrase they’re using to identify their unique product. To gain more complete legal protection, firms can register their trademark with the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and if approved, the unique identifier can be paired with the ® symbol, indicating that it is a registered trademark.

Unlike copyrights, registered trademarks never expire, but to keep them active, firms must continue to use their trademarks in commerce as well as “file certain documents at regular intervals” to show that they’re continuing to use them.

The PTO has a trademark search tool on its site that allows anyone interested to search the Office’s extensive database of “live” (active) and “dead” (inactive) trademarks. A search for “Mickey Mouse” yields over 49,600 results, some alive and some dead trademarks.

The Walt Disney Company and Disney Enterprises, Inc. are responsible for many of the Mickey Mouse registrations, each of which tends to be specific to a particular category of products, such as:

Jewelry; watches
Action figures and accessories
Bathing suits; dresses; gloves; hats; caps; jackets; pajamas
Balloons; Christmas tree decorations
Plush toys and jigsaw puzzles.

In short, Disney has a registered trademark for just about any product on which it would likely want to place the words “Mickey Mouse.” The company also has many live and pending trademarks for “Disney Mickey & Co.,” which include a contemporary Mickey Mouse graphic. It would seem, therefore, that Disney is at little risk of losing rights to its heavily trademarked modern Mickey.

In contrast, Steamboat Willie and a few of Walt’s other short films featuring the first Mickey Mouse were protected by copyright, but the early Mickey apparently was not trademarked. So, legally it’s possible to create a violent video game and a horror film with Steamboat Willie.

As evidence, a very similar situation unfolded just two years ago on January 1, 2022, when the characters from A.A. Milne’s 1926 classic “Winnie-the-Pooh” entered the public domain. The next year, writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield made the slasher film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” What’s more, a sequel is due to be released later this year. Ironically, the owner of the copyrights to the Pooh characters is/was . . . the Disney corporation.

Cases like these are good reminders that just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ethical. Historic examples of misalignment between legality and morality include the state-sponsored persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and laws that promoted racial segregation in the United States before the Civil Rights Movement.

So, even if law allows, should Steamboat Willie be cast as a video game or horror film slasher? For people who don’t appreciate those genres, the easy answer is “no,” but what if Willie were made into a short-selling stockbroker, a hard-nose football coach, a doctor with curt bedside manner, an aggressive trial lawyer, etc.?

Although most people probably would not regard those roles as being as blatantly bad as a horror film slasher, they’re still big departures from the whimsical, fun-loving mouse that Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created, that's the ancestor of the brand character that represents wholesomeness and joy for many, and that serves as a strong connection to fond memories with family and friends.

So, the question about creative works no longer covered by copyright law is this:

Even if law allows for their free use, is it right for others to use them in ways that denigrate, disparage, misrepresent, or malign what the original author intended and, in many cases, invested considerable time and talent to create conceptually then tangibly?

Certainly, the work’s author and their heirs are one very important stakeholder group to consider. Although the author will be deceased by the time their work enters the public domain, their legacy lives on and doesn’t deserve to be tarnished.

Another primary group of stakeholders are the people who enjoy the work. They would like to continue to appreciate it, if not in its original form, then in one that honors and extends its positive perceptions.

There’s also the notion of respecting the work for its own sake. Just like most would consider it wrong to shout during an orchestra performance, deface a painting, litter a pristine landscape, or talk on a cellphone during a play, it also might be considered poor taste to pejoratively alter a creative work.

Human beings are unique in their capacity to create. The creative process is almost always a collective endeavor – if individuals are not working together directly, then they are sharing/borrowing ideas and gaining inspiration from others across distance and time.

It’s good to accept and contribute to the collective nature of the creative process. It’s also important to respect what others create by not deprecating their work in material ways that might produce a lasting negative impact.

Casting Steamboat Willie as a serial killer may be legal, but morally it’s gross degradation of a time-honored creative work that’s closely connected to a trusted brand, which makes the projected horror film and violent videogame strategies “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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A Case for Marketing Ethics

12/20/2023

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

When students approach me after class it’s often because they missed a quiz, have a question about an assignment, or want to chat about a topic of mutual interest. So, I was surprised recently when a student waited until others had left, then said, “Hey, Dr. Hagenbuch, I have a question about an ethical issue.”

The inquiry wasn’t entirely unexpected. We discuss ethical issues often in my classes, and sometimes students ask my opinion about questionable strategies they’ve seen in the news or that they imagine companies might use. However, this question wasn’t hypothetical.

Grant (not his real name) had been working for several months as an intern with a company that sold the products of various manufacturers in a particular business-to-business industry. He provided the firm different forms of marketing support, including help with social media.

Now the company wanted to share in social media specific consumer questions and its responses, which would highlight as solutions specific manufactures’ products, but there was one problem: The company had no actual consumer questions along the lines of what it wanted, so some in the firm decided it would be easiest to create not just the questions but also imaginary consumers to ask them.

Grant didn’t wonder whether what his company was considering was unethical; he knew it was wrong. It probably helped him, however, to hear me validate his concern. His question to me was more about what he might do or say.

As we talked about the issue, one of the first things that came to my mind was Sports Illustrated’s recent moral lapse. The iconic magazine about all things athletic ran afoul of public opinion on a viral scale when it apparently used artificial intelligence to write articles that it attributed to human beings.

First off, the articles appeared fake; for instance, one suggested that volleyball can be hard to play without a ball. Second, the authors seemed contrived. One writer, Drew Ortiz, had no publishing history or social media presence, all while a website that sells AI-generated headshots was offering for sale the same suspicious-looking profile picture that Sports Illustrated used for him on its site.

Unfortunately, Sports Illustrated isn’t the only organization faking it. A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed that phony product reviews, especially on Amazon, are more rampant than most of us ever would imagine.

Grant understood and rejected such deception. He could tell his coworkers that it's unethical to deceive and that creating fake customers would represent that very infraction. However, his colleagues might not be receptive to such a blunt rebuke and indictment of their character, particularly not from an intern.

So, I suggested that he mention the Sports Illustrated example and delicately suggest that things could turn out badly for their own company if they followed a similar tack and their strategy were exposed.

I felt for Grant in this predicament, but I also was very glad that he not only recognized there was an ethical issue, he was conflicted enough by it that he wanted to talk about it. For me those two things represented a moral victory.

Having worked in business for about a decade and having taught ethics in higher education for a couple more, my strong sense is that many moral issues in business are either not recognized, or they’re rationalized away, or they’re simply ignored. Grant cleared each of those moral hurdles. He then went a step further by talking with me.

Why don’t more marketers and others do what Grant did? That’s a difficult question to answer short of some formal research. Maybe I’ll conduct such a study sometime, but in the meantime, I asked Grant to reflect on his decision process and actions, which he graciously did.

I first asked Grant how he came to see the tactic as a potential ethical issue. He responded:

“In the project proposal my manager asked me to make fake client profiles on our website and have them send messages to our Product Advisor Channel. We would then take each fake question and make an Instagram style reel answering it. These Q&A reels would be used to promote partnered manufacturers and create a new style of content for our media channels.”

“I questioned the ethics of this project because we would be claiming to have organic questions coming from clients, and our company would be giving advice and solving problems when the questions weren’t being asked by actual clients. In my mind this comes across as lying to our customers to get engagement, benefit our company, and our manufacture partners.”

However, Grant also showed discernment in recognizing the multifaceted nature of the issue:

“I also saw how doing this could benefit clients. If we were posing questions that were legitimate and providing truthful answers, I can see how it would benefit the community. There could be advice given by our professionals that could help clients, even if it was from an account that we claimed to be organic, when in actuality they were our own.”

Many ethical issues involve legitimate competing considerations, which is one of the things that makes them so challenging. If they were easy, we wouldn’t have dilemmas.

Second, I asked Grant why he decided to mention his moral concern to me. He replied:

“The reason I mentioned it to you was because I know that you are passionate about going about marketing the right way. More and more I feel like the lines between legal and ethical are being blurred. We see a lot of marketers that are not concerned with the ethics of their marketing or in some cases don’t even realize that they are being unethical in their practices. I know that you have experience in marketing and because of this I sought out your advice.”

I was glad that Grant thought of me as someone who cared about ethics and could act as a helpful sounding board. I’ve often benefited by having people in my life to turn to for opinions and advice. I was happy to offer the same to him.

Reflecting on this experience with Grant has made me think of factors that should influence a person’s ethical decision making. There are surely more, but Grant’s actions in this instance have led me to identify three very important considerations:

1. Recognition: Conventional wisdom has long held that the first step in overcoming a problem is to admit having one. Similarly, good managers know it’s ineffective to discuss strategies before identifying the underlying challenges. Moral decision-making should follow the same approach.

It’s likely that many people wouldn't bat an eye if they received the same request that Grant got from his boss. The directive didn’t set well with Grant, probably because of his upbringing and deep-rooted beliefs and perhaps also because of the priority marketing ethics have received during his college education.

2. Regard: Just because someone recognizes an issue doesn’t necessarily mean they think it’s a meaningful one. Some needs are naturally more important than others, which is why discernment is critical and with it genuine concern.

Occasionally, an unrepentant offender will say, “I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway.” Even very smart people are capable of abhorrent things if they don’t care. Thankfully, Grant cared.

3. Recommendations: No one has all the answers. Instead of relying just on our own ideas and instincts to guide our actions, our outcomes will usually improve when we ask others for their input.

In deciding moral issues, it’s especially helpful to gain the advice of someone objective who doesn’t have a direct interest in the outcome but who also has insight into the type of issue at hand. Grant happened to ask me, but the most important thing is that he sought a second opinion from someone who could offer an unbiased and informed one.

Whether Grant decides to refuse his boss’s request or honor it, perhaps with some caveats, his recognition of the problem, genuine regard for the outcome, and request for another’s recommendation place his moral decision-making ahead of that of most others. Grant’s actions also suggest that even before graduating college, he’s a practitioner of “Mindful Marketing.”

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