Category: + Fairness

Resolving to be More Moral

1/5/2025

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing -
author of Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick

With a new year come resolutions, often aimed at life-changing actions like exercising more and working less. Any effort to become the best version of ourselves is commendable, so why haven’t we heard this resolution? “In 2025, I want to be more ethical.”

As 2024 ended, it was interesting to read articles that curated top headlines from the prior twelve months, which reminded us of major life-altering and world-shaping events. Like other years, 2024 saw continued war and devastating natural disasters, and who can forget the contentious U.S. presidential election or the inspiring Paris Olympics?

Certain people commanded news coverage in good ways, while others did for the wrong reasons:

P-Diddy was accused of sex trafficking that involved drug-fueled orgies.
Luigi Mangione has been charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
Former U.S. congressman Matt Gaetz purportedly paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex and drugs, including to a minor.
Dominique Pelicot was sentenced in France to 20 years in prison for drugging and abusing his then wife while also inviting dozens of strangers to rape her.
A fifteen-year-old girl in Madison Wisconsin reportedly killed a fellow student and a teacher.

Regrettably, poor moral choices weren’t restricted to individuals. Several large companies pooled employee maleficence, leading to these newsworthy corporate scandals:

Mineral water producer Perrier utilized banned water purification processes.
Commodity trader Trifugura engaged in data manipulation, inflated payments, and concealing overdue receivables – fraud that will account for approximately $1.1 billion in losses.
The U.S. Justice Department found multinational software company SAP guilty of bribery in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), fining the company $220 million.
The U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) fined the Netherlands affiliate of accounting giant KPMG $25 million for cheating on mandatory internal training exams.

Of course, there were also millions of other unscrupulous acts that were too trivial to be newsworthy or that evaded public scrutiny for other reasons. However, in terms of morality, 2024 was not much different than 2023, and 2025, unfortunately, probably won’t see significant improvement.

So, given people’s proclivity to mess up and our perennial need for moral development, why don’t individuals make New Year’s resolutions to be more ethical?

Of the many plausible explanations, here are several that are most likely:

People don’t see a need: If asked if they’re ethical, most people would probably respond that they are, which by and large is true. Although we all make mistakes, it’s likely a small percentage of people who commit unethical acts routinely.
It’s a very broad pledge: Without a detailed action plan, it’s hard to even begin to approach such a far-reaching and expansive goal, i.e., “It’s a good objective, but how exactly do I accomplish it?”
It’s difficult to measure: At year’s end, how does one know if they’ve been more ethical? The goal’s ambiguity and lack of clear benchmarks make it hard to easily see success. How exactly do you quantify and appraise ethical behavior?
It’s daunting: Possible failure is likely why many potential resolutions never occur. No one likes to fall short of goals, particularly if they share them with other people.

That said, the most challenging goals are sometimes the most worthwhile ones, which is certainly the case for ethics. As rational, caring humans, we should want:

To be the best version of ourselves, which connects closely to our moral choices
To be true to our values and employ consistency across moral decisions
To be good stewards of our actions, realizing their impact on others, including on our family, friends, the organizations we serve, as well as on our world.
To avoid the major moral meltdowns described above that profoundly altered individuals lives and/or came at tremendous costs to organizations.

Fortunately, most people don’t face significant ethical choices each day. However, moral dilemmas are unpredictable: They’re like tornados that can arise with little warning and quickly become severe.

People who live in Tornado Alley understand the uncertainty and danger of the weather, so many there take necessary precautions and “have a safety plan in place.”

We each should follow that example and have a plan for moral decision-making, so when issues arise, we’re ready for them. Such a plan should involve specific actions like:

Adopting a model for ethical decision-making, i.e., a set of moral standards that can be used for any ethical dilemma.
Keeping ethics top-of-mind by reading thought-provoking opinion pieces and engaging with others who are interested in moral decision-making
Enlisting others to act as sounding boards for our decisions and to help hold us accountable
Making moral choices preemptively, or deciding before we actually need to decide.

These are several of the specific action steps I unpack in the final chapter of my new book (shameless plug), Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick.

Yes, we should resolve to make more moral choices, but do such resolutions really help? The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which I used for my doctoral dissertation and hundreds of other researchers also have used successfully, suggests that they do.

According to the TPB, our intentions are the main determinant of our behavior. There are very few actions people take that they don’t first intend to take.

Have you made a New Year’s resolution? Any time of year is a good time to resolve to act ethically. Doing so brings many benefits, including more “Mindful Marketing.”

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Check out the book, Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick

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Can AI Advertising be the Real Thing?

12/1/2024

16 Comments

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

Coca-Cola has a long history of very memorable holiday ads, from its iconic Coke-swigging Santa to the surprisingly peaceful polar bears. This year’s campaign seeks to capture similar feelings of goodwill, warmth, and cheer but with AI-generated output, which raises the question: Should the company that’s touted its product as the real thing for more than a century now be creating advertising that’s not?

Longer-tenured consumers like me remember Coca-Cola’s longstanding tagline “The Real Thing,” which the company leaned on heavily in the 1970s following its successful 1969 campaign, “Can’t Beat The Real Thing.” Actually, the company had articulated the theme even earlier, e.g., on painted signs in the 1940s.

The notion that Coke is the real thing, or the original cola, can be traced to the late 1800s: Coke came to market in 1886, 12 years before its archrival Pepsi, giving Coca-Cola not only first-mover advantage but the right to boast that any cola coming after it was a mere facsimile.

The word real hasn’t appeared in all the company’s advertising, yet Coca-Cola has always sought to position itself as authentic and genuine – distinct branding threads that have woven their way through the company’s varied promotion, particularly in its holiday ads.

For instance, the look of the Santa Claus character that many know and love is largely a Coca-Cola creation. In 1931, the company and D'Arcy Advertising Agency tapped Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born Illustrator, to create images of Santa Claus for the firm’s ads.

Before then, Santa Claus was often depicted as “everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf.” Sundblom, however, took inspiration from Clement Clark Moore's 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) to transform Santa’s image into what’s typical today – “a warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human Santa.” Such an inviting persona meshed seamlessly with Coca-Cola’s wholesome brand image and helped to further propagate its portrayal as the real thing.

Beside his appealing personality, Sundblom Santa’s bright red hat and coat, their white trim, and his full white beard also placed him squarely on-brand in terms of colors, and the company used the holiday character heavily over the next several decades.

In 1993, Coca-Cola introduced another endearing creation – animated polar bears. Although the company had used a polar bear in a French print ad in 1922, the bears that Coca-Cola creator Ken Stewart designed in the early 1990s developed a much longer-lasting legacy.

In their first television commercial, about sixteen furry white polar bears, each holding a bottle of Coke, sat contently on the artic tundra, oohing and ahhing as they watched the aurora borealis (northern lights). Near the end of the 30-second spot, they sipped their sodas, smacked their lips, and let out one more collective ahh. The commercial culminated with a close-up of one particularly pleasant bear with plump cheeks and friendly eyes that seemed to smile for the camera as it held its frosty soda bottle high.

In another 90-second spot from around 2005, the bears crashed the Christmas party of a pack of penguins that were dancing to the Beach Boys’ holiday favorite “Little Saint Nick.” At first the penguins were startled, but after one of their chicks shared a bottle of Coke with a bear cub, everyone smiled and happily joined the festivities. Leave it to Coca-Cola to make even one of the world’s fiercest predators fit its brand.

Even as the polar bears’ popularity grew, in 1995 the company unfurled another memorable campaign called “Holidays are Coming” that featured a seemingly endless caravan of light-bedazzled and ornately decorated 18-wheel big rigs sporting Coca-Cola’s trademark script lettering and larger-than-life images of its affable Santa Claus.

The spectacular line of long haulers rolled down country roads to the chant of “holidays are coming,” lighting up forests and bridges as they passed and pleasantly surprising a variety of delighted onlookers. Although certain parts of these mid-1990s ads leveraged special effects, much of what viewers saw was real, including the people in the spots.

Thirty years later, these “Holidays are Coming” ads are the inspiration for the company’s new AI-generated campaign, which carry the same name and decked-out trucks but haven’t engendered the same warm response as the original ads.

Produced by three different AI studios, the three new AI-generated ads, have received some very frosty reviews. As the New York Times has reported, one critic called the ads “slop” that “ruins the Christmas spirit,” while another claimed the company has significantly lowered its standards with the “heartbreaking” campaign, and a third, Alan Hirsch, the creator of the animated TV show Gravity Falls, suggested Coca-Cola’s signature red represents “the blood of out-of-work artists.”

So, why risk messing with a good thing and the Real Thing by using AI to produce the new ads? A main motivation was likely money, as Garrett Sloan writing for AdAge suggested: “Backers of the technology are excited about how it could bring more creative tools to more people, more cheaply.”

It’s easy to imagine that Coca-Cola’s original “Holidays are Coming” ads, with their elaborately decorated trucks, remote outdoor settings, and abundant special effects, were very expensive to produce – probably millions of dollars – and took a long time to script, schedule, shoot, and edit. Why shouldn’t the company leverage technology’s cutting edge to save time and trim expenses?

Asking that question seems to fly in the face of the conclusion of my last Mindful Marketing article, “Does Human Made Matter?” in which I deduced, Yes, it matters. So, why was AI use out-of-bounds a few weeks ago but in-play now?

While some suggest that AI shouldn’t be used for anything and others argue that all AI use is acceptable, I stand between the two extremes. I’m firmly in the middle but will lean a little closer to one side or the other based on the efficacy of the application and the ethics of the situation.

As the last Mindful Marketing article suggested, many value originality in art and appreciate a sense of personal connection with the art’s creator, such as ones stemming from shared life experiences. Human connections and true originality are both things that are difficult if not impossible for AI to replicate.

On the other hand, most people probably don’t mind if AI generated a promotional email they received or was used to create a billboard they read.

The ultimate purpose of most advertising is to sell products, so although advertising is part science and part art, it doesn’t have the same thresholds for originality and personal connection as pure art does. Most people probably feel a deeper human connection with a favorite painting or song than they do with a Coca-Cola promotional piece. The notion that there’s a different standard for commercial content opens the door for AI use in advertising.

Someone who sees firsthand the effective and ethical use that marketing can make of AI is Matt Caylor, Account Director with Martin Communications, Inc., located near Harrisburg, PA. While he warns against blindly accepting AI output, which can be dangerous because it’s not always correct, Caylor also has experienced many productive uses of the technology including copy iteration, data analysis, and design assistance, as he explains:

“The technology can save time in editing and design, taking some of the mundane or tedious work off our plates. It can work as a partner in the initial iteration of messaging, often acting as an agent to bounce ideas off. It can be an agile assistant that reviews and analyzes large data sets, crunches numbers, or helps develop new queries.”

Does human input matter to Caylor and others at Martin Communications? It surely does, and like many others working in marketing, Caylor and his colleagues are continually learning how to effectively integrate their own insights with the technology tools – just as humans have done for millennia.

So, does it matter if Coca-Cola’s “Holidays are Coming” ads aren’t the Real Thing. Yes and no.

It matters in that consumers’ perceptions, whether correct or not, are their reality. For instance, some viewers seem to believe that all the people in the ads are AI-generated, even though Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP and global head of generative AI, says at least some are not. Still, when people perceive a little AI in an ad, their tendency is to extrapolate that everything in it is AI.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola is only doing what Caylor and individuals in many other fields do each day – use AI selectively and responsibly to leverage their own time and talents. As Thakar explains: “Our human creatives make decisions and use AI as a tool.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Coca-Cola’s using AI as a tool to help create its new “Holidays are Coming” ads. However, given individuals’ current impressions of AI, because people have special expectations for authenticity around the Holidays, and since Coca-Cola has built a reputation for realism, the company’s AI use in the ads may have been too much too soon, or a case of Simple-Minded Marketing.

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Does Human-Made Matter?

11/2/2024

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

How do you position a business ethics book versus dozens of others on the market? That’s been a top-of-mind question and exciting opportunity while writing my book on Mindful Marketing. One point of differentiation I wouldn’t have imagined when I started blogging about ethics 10 years ago is this: My book is written by a human.

A few weeks ago, I came across the interesting and apropos news that the Author’s Guild, “the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization for published writers,” has plans to offer a new “Human Authored Label” that it’s 15,000 members can place directly on the covers of books they write.

The impetus for the initiative, of course, is to distinguish works written by real people from those compiled by AI. Apparently, the surge in AI-authored books has become so strong that Amazon has set a policy limiting self-published Kindle eBooks to three per day.

A related concern is that the purveyors of some AI-written books are trying to scam readers by pretending that real people wrote them, which is part of the bigger issue of AI appropriating others’ work.

As a human author, my first reaction to the proof of personhood label was “That’s great!” Then, I glanced around my home office space and started considering all the things I use each day that weren’t handcrafted by humans, which made me wonder:

Does human-made matter?

I doubt that one specific person made the MacBook on which I’m typing. Considering the hundreds of different parts that comprise a computer, it’s likely that dozens of people played different roles in designing, manufacturing, and delivering the laptop, which I still don’t think of as human-made, but in some ways it is.

Humanity has a long history of inventing specific tools and automating entire production processes to accomplish work more efficiently and effectively, for instance: the spear, the wheel, plows, harvesting machines, moveable type, internal combustion engines, excavating equipment, assembly line machinery, microchips.

These innovations and many others have been integral to the advance of civilizations and improved quality of life. Along the way, technology also has made obsolete certain jobs, e.g., digging with shovels, while creating new ones, e.g., designing, selling, operating, and servicing excavating equipment.

Like most people, I’m grateful for the innovative goods and services, some not available just a few decades ago, that make work more productive and life more enjoyable. I’m also thankful for the technological tools that have made many of these products possible, sometimes with little human input.

Lack of human intervention is a main difference between artificial intelligence and other technology to-date. Take this article, which I’ll write over the course of several days or more and will end up being about 2,000 words. Yet I know if I were to give ChatGPT the prompt, “Write a 2,000-word Mindful Marketing article on the topic ‘Does Human-Made Matter?’” it could probably compose a coherent piece in about five seconds.

Could I claim authorship of the essay? Well, if the chatbot trained on the more than 300 Mindful Marketing articles I’ve written over the past decade, yes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel right taking credit for the piece. Doing so would kind of be like asking Einstein to explain the theory of relativity, then claiming ownership of his answer.

Asking a question, even a very good one, isn’t the same as answering it. In most cases the latter is a much, much heavier lift.

In terms of who or what’s doing the lifting, we might envision a continuum. On one end are tangible goods like laptops and services like haircuts that require interaction with the physical world. Although AI can show us digitally what we’d look like with a different hairstyle, actual hair cutting/styling is still a people-intensive service that needs real scissors and actual human hands, at least for now.

On the other end of the spectrum are intangible/digital products like this article, cover letters, and work emails that AI can crank out with no more than a simple human prompt. Apple’s new “Apple Intelligence” ad spoofs how easy it is for AI to turn human-made trash into supervisor-pleasing treasure.

The 60-second spot shows an utterly incompetent employee, Warren, typing this message into his iPhone 16: “Hey, J, this project might need a bit of zhuhzing . . . but you’re the big enchilada. Holler back, Warren.” Before sending it, he taps the writing tool icon “Professional,” which metamorphosizes the mess.

Moments later J, who appears to be Warren’s boss, receives the transformed message: “Hey J, Upon further consideration, I believe this project may require some refinement. However, you are the most capable individual to undertake this task. Please let me know your thoughts. Best regards, Warren.”

J is noticeably impressed as he reads the memo aloud, then pauses with surprise at the signature, “Warren? Huh.” His tone and facial expression suggest he thinks he may have been underestimating his seemingly inept subordinate. Meanwhile, Warren celebrates his tech-enabled victory, boldly twirling a USB cable in the air to the sound of an upbeat Apple music bed with lyrics “I am genius, whoaaa . . ”

Human made didn’t seem to matter to Warren. Will it matter to J? Stay tuned.

Of course, on the digital end of the continuum, there are more profound, spirit-moving, and sense-stimulating things AI can create than a work email: AI also can make art.

AI’s creation of visual and aural art has been a point of contention for artists who understandably don’t want blatant forgeries and veiled facsimiles of their work sold without proper recognition and reward.

But what if AI makes art that appears, for all intents and purposes, to be original, i.e., it doesn’t infringe in any noticeable way on any specific artist’s intellectual property? In those cases, should human-made matter?

Since my own artistic background is limited, I recently reach out to two people who very legitimately hold the title artist and asked each to answer the question, “Why does human-made matter?”

One artist I approached was Susan Getty, a freelance artist, writer, and editor. Full disclosure, our home proudly displays several of her paintings.

In describing why human-made matters to her as an artist, Susan emphasized that art’s value stems not just from the finished work but from the process of making it. She extolled fulfilling “an inborn impulse to create” that comes from working with her hands in tangible, physical materials.

She also pointed to the value of what she learns through the art-making process, like “understanding how colors mix, how paper folds, how a brush spreads different kinds of paint.” This constant learning stimulates her imagination and helps keep her “connected to the physical world,” which she laments may be lost by a society that spends too much time in virtual space.

Susan also appreciates art’s value in allowing a person to learn from their mistakes and cope with failure:

“There’s something crucial about a deep personal investment of time, money and effort and experiencing either an enthusiastic reception or apathetic dismissal from others. I believe that every human ought to, at some point in life, come to their own terms on what success and failure mean.”

Although Susan appreciates technology and uses the web to find reference photos, learn about different artistic techniques, and gain inspiration from the work of artists around the world, she doesn’t believe artmaking is intended to be the quick and easy process that AI tries to make it.

As an art appreciator, she wants to feel a connection with the artist, which comes from seeing energy, spontaneity, and individual interpretation in the work. Ultimately, she wants herself and those who appreciate her art to have what AI can’t provide – a shared human experience.

The other artist I asked to answer the question “Why does human-made matter?” is one I know especially well – my son Daniel Hagenbuch, who is both a musician (violin and piano) and a composer. He’s currently completing a Master of Music in Composition at Peabody Institute in Baltimore.

Daniel believes music is a gift that composers create very intentionally for their audiences: “[Music composition] is a time-based art form that both requires composers to spend time thoughtfully crafting ideas and time for listeners to hear those ideas unfold.” He adds that a gift a person carefully and specifically makes for someone else naturally has more meaning than one given with little reflection or effort.

He contrasts quick-and-easy AI-generated music to human composers spending “hundreds of hours transcribing music by hand, using notation software, engraving, creating parts, and rehearsing music with live performers in order to create the best experience for audience members.”

Daniel believes this intimate involvement with their craft gives human composers “a more nuanced approach and understanding of the compositional process from start to finish,” which allows them to make writing choices that defy computer algorithms and depart from the formulaic patterns by which AI operates.

He maintains that composers, like all humans, have distinct personalities that are functions of their personal experiences and that show through in their music, “reflecting their individual musical tastes and intuition.” Listeners, he contends, are drawn to those personalities and connect with them through the music.

He concludes: “People are wired with a desire for human connection and only human composers can fulfill that longing.”

Oil paints and C sharps – Their art is very different, but many similarities exist between Susan’s and Daniel’s responses to the question of why human-made matters. For instance, both emphasize the importance of the creative process, for artists and for those who appreciate their art.

Each also suggests that art becomes more meaningful when there’s an artist-appreciator relationship, i.e., a human connection. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the two ever meet, yet the appreciator feels like they know the artist by virtue of learning the artist’s story and/or being familiar with their other work.

The bottom-line is human-made does matter, maybe less for some things, like my laptop’s components, but very much for other things, like art. It’s good to lean into technology in ways that make sense, but we also need to be careful not to become like Apple’s Warren and depend on devices to the detriment of our own personal and professional development. Even Apple hinted that Warren’s ineptitude will be found out.

In the book-writing process, I’ve asked AI a couple of specific questions and enlisted its help in formatting bibliography references, but I haven’t had it write any of the manuscript. Maybe that’s a mistake – ChatGPT is much smarter than I am. However, AI hasn’t enjoyed the special experiences and rewarding relationships I have that form the stories and fuel the insights that are the backbone of much of the narrative.

As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in our lives, there will be more opportunities to use it productively and to position against it by appealing to the unique impact of personhood. Human-made is not a fail-safe, but it will always hold potential for Mindful Marketing.

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A Decade of Very Demure, Very Mindful Marketing

10/1/2024

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

It’s hard to believe that Mindful Marketing has been shining a light on ethics in the field for ten years! TikTok didn’t exist in September 2014, when I wrote “CVS Quits Smoking,” the very first article on MindfulMarketing.org. Likewise, the appetite for influencer content, such as Jools Lebron’s “Very demure, very mindful” viral videos, was just starting to grow. The world looked different in many ways during the fall of 2014:

Barrack Obama was a year-and-a-half into his second term as president.
Prince Harry was still single and part of the British royal family.
Tom Brady had won just three of his seven Super Bowls.
Instagram was only six years old.
Apple’s newest phones were the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
On May 23, Tesla stock closed at a mere $13.82 a share.
Russia had invaded Crimea just a half year earlier.
George Floyd was still alive.
The #MeToo movement was several years away.
The world didn’t know what a global pandemic would be like.
It was still a year before Volkswagen’s notorious Dieselgate.
The URL MindfulMarketing.org was still available.
I had less gray hair

When I created the Mindful Marketing concept and Mindful Matrix ten years ago, I dreamed of doing the impossible: moving the needle on ethics in my field. As most people realize, marketing unfortunately has a reputation for being among the most morally suspect professions.

Each year Gallup conducts a poll in which it asks respondents to rate the honesty and ethical standards of 20 or so occupations. Inevitably, at the top of the list are jobs like doctor, nurse, and pharmacist, while near the bottom are several marketing occupations such as telemarketer, advertising practitioner, and car salesperson.

High-profile morale lapses like Volkswagen developing a defeat-device to trick emission tests, Wells Fargo employees creating fake accounts, and Turing Pharmaceutical’s CEO Martin Shkreli increasing the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%, have suggested that marketing ethics are easily forgotten.

Several other fields like accounting and law have continuing education requirements that include focus on ethics. Unfortunately, marketing does not. Consequently, a main aim of Mindful Marketing has always been to make ethics sticky.

A research paper I coauthored by Laureen Mgrdichian, published in Marketing Education Review, explains how Mindful Marketing utilizes a common analytical tool, a 2 x 2 matrix akin to the Boston Consulting Group’s portfolio matrix, to encourage conversations about ethical issues. The article also describes how Mindful Marketing leverages branding – a tool that organizations large and small use to differentiate their products from those of competitors and make them more memorable, i.e., stickier.

Admittedly, in ten years Mindful Marketing hasn’t come close to grabbing the incredible social media attention that Jools Lebron has gained in a few months – 2.2 million followers on TikTok – but it has received other significant recognition and exposure including:

Dozens of articles republished on CommPro.biz
Interviews by The New York Times, Fast Company, U.S. News & World Report, National Public Radio, and The Boston Globe
Many speaking opportunities such as at the American Marketing Association’s annual Leadership Summit, the Marketing & Public Policy conference, the Marketing Management Association conference, and a special AI-focused conference of the British Academy of Management.

The most exciting new development is that there will soon be a Mindful Marketing book!

I’ve signed an agreement with Kendall Hunt to write “Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick,” which should be published this December. I am grateful to have been granted a sabbatical from teaching this fall to work on the book, which is now 80 percent complete.

Over the years, several people have asked me whether I might write a book on Mindful Marketing. Initially, I brushed off the suggestions, but as the site’s marketing ethics content continued to grow and gain traction, I began to give the idea more serious consideration.

A few years ago, I traveled back in the Mindful Marketing archives to September 2014, reviewed all the articles from that time forward, and curated them into specific categories to match topics I teach in my business ethics class. There are now over 320 Mindful Marketing articles, which provide a wealth of choices for engaging real-world applications to almost any ethical issue in marketing imaginable.

The articles have served my business ethics students well for discussions of topics ranging from utilitarianism, to economic and social justice, to decency. So, I thought if Mindful Marketing works for my course, it might work for others' classes. Moreover, a book seemed like the logical way to extend Mindful Marketing’s reach.

Some may wonder why marketing should be the focus of a business ethics book. Among other strong support, there are the arguments that marketing:

“Is the distinguishing, unique function of business”
“Is the lifeblood of any company”
Touches every business area
Directly impacts consumers many times a day
Is used by business leaders (e.g., CEOs, VPs, partners)
Is used by everyone (e.g., market their ideas, themselves)
Is replete with moral issues to which students can readily relate

While students are the primary audience, I believe the book also will have value for marketing practitioners, who are the ones making the moral decisions that ultimately determine the ethical perceptions and realities of the field. Of course I’m biased, but I believe the book also will be an interesting read for anyone who is intrigued by, or concerned about, marketing’s unique impact on our world.

Most important, my hope is that the book will encourage more students-turned-marketing-professionals to hit pause and ask if the strategies they see or plan to use are Mindful Marketing.

Our world will be a better place when there are more professionals like Kaylee Enck, who even when hearing about a rom-com’s unconventional promotional approach, remembered the Mindful Marketing conversations she engaged in a few years earlier as a student, felt moral dissonance, and questioned the film producer’s strategy. Kaylee’s experience and others like hers show that Mindful Marketing’s stickiness offers strong hope for making an impact on ethics in the field.

It’s interesting to see how much more often the word mindful is used now than it was a decade ago. Sometimes the contexts are physical health, or mental well-being, or even demure attire. Although those uses are different, they’re complementary – they’re all about being thoughtful and principled.

It’s good for us to be mindful in many different ways. Given the breadth and depth of marketing’s reach, our world will especially benefit from more Mindful Marketing.

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Check out Mindful Marketing Ads and Vote your Mind!

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Questions are the Key to AI and Ethics

5/3/2024

24 Comments

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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What a Mouse Can Teach Us About Morality

1/8/2024

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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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All Play: How Companies Can Make More Inclusive Toys

9/13/2023

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A collection of play balls, some containing icons for sound, touch, and smell

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

Toss-Across, Evel Knievel, Simon, Big Wheel – the most popular toys of the 1970s offer a trip down memory lane for many of us who were kids during that unique era. We probably didn’t think then that some children weren’t able to enjoy these common playthings because of certain physical limitations. Over the past 50 years, the world has become more welcoming in many ways, but have toy makers kept pace with the inclusivity trend?

Legos have been fixtures in family rooms for at least a few decades. The tiny bumpy bricks provide appropriate challenge and fun for children from four to 14 and beyond. Kids who can’t see also can snap together the blocks to build shapes and structures, but they haven’t been able to appreciate the variety of colors or visualize their finished work in all the ways that sighted children can.

In 2019, the Lego Group conceived a creative way to bridge the participation gap by using the bricks’ raised knobs to represented braille letters. For the last few years, the company distributed its Braille Bricks selectively – mainly to individuals and organizations teaching children with visual impairments. Recently, the firm made the 287-piece set widely available for purchase, so blind and sighted members of any family can enjoy playing with and learning from the uniquely inclusive toys.

Mattel also has done a good in making its iconic Barbie doll more inclusive. For decades, the company has added dolls of different races and ethnicities to the collection, and in more recent years, it’s introduced dolls with disabilities and different body types.

Product inclusivity is a great thing. It’s hard to imagine products being ‘too inclusive,’ especially one’s targeted toward children.

As I’ve spoken with college students about product inclusivity, some have said they didn’t care whether their Barbies looked like them or not, but others really appreciated having dolls whose skin colors and other physical attributes mirrored their own.

Jason Polansky, one of my former advisees who is totally blind, has worked in employee recruitment roles for Microsoft and Whole Foods and now has a position as an unemployment claims interviewer with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. We had many good conversations when he was a student and more since he graduated several years ago, but I never thought much about his childhood – what it was like to grow up blind – and I certainly didn’t think of the toys he played with, so I recently asked him about them.

Polansky said he mainly liked playing with tactile toys such as Legos, Duplos, and Geomags, as well as a braille/tactile Battleship game, a Connect 4 game with holes in the black checkers, and braille Uno cards. He also enjoyed audible toys like a talking trivia globe, a puzzle map of the United States, a talking clock, and "two buckets full of dinosaurs and reptiles."

Sound was a mixed blessing for Polansky. Although he enjoyed listening to cassette tapes and AM/FM/shortwave radio, the same sounds sometimes created a problem when they kept him from hearing other noises in his environment that he needed to hear. In fact, when he was about six, he went through a stage in which many extraneous sounds scared him for that reason.

Sadie McFarland is one of my current advisees. Because of optic nerve hypoplasia, she has no vision in her right eye and limited functional vision in her left one, which means she is legally blind. Although McFarland reflects fondly on playing with Barbies and a variety of other toys and games when she was a child, her attention now as a college marketing major is drawn to the lack of playthings designed for children with disabilities, especially those with vision impairments.

Even as she credits brands like Barbie and American Girl for making dolls that “give beautiful nods” to individuals who have prosthetic devices, use wheelchairs, and have diverse skin tones, she laments that companies in the toy industry have done relatively little to represent blindness.

McFarland recommends making dolls whose eyes move sporadically, mimicking nystagmus, placing a white cane in the doll’s hand, and equipping it with a guide dog in harness. She adds that blindness also can be identified with certain types of glasses.

As an adult, McFarland still loves to play games but often finds them challenging because “at least 75% contain items with text that is nearly microscopic, even to the working human eye.” Some of her suggested fixes are to provide braille instructions and scorecards and to create tactile boards and differently shaped pieces. She also recommends reaching out to organizations like the National Federation of the Blind and American Printing House for the Blind, which can provide useful insights into meeting the needs of blind consumers.

It's nice to imagine a world in which more companies heed such advice and genuinely attempt to make products, especially toys, accessible to a broader range of people; however, the reality is that companies need to pay vendors, make payroll, and provide ROI to shareholders, all of which may appear to preclude satisfying some niche markets.

Of course, companies can gain goodwill be serving underrepresented people groups, but is it right to expect companies to lose money doing so? As a corollary, the law requires organizations to make reasonable accommodations for employees with special needs, unless doing so represents an undue hardship.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have an either-or decision. Several years ago, Polansky and I coauthored an article titled, “How Serving Blind Consumers Creates Competitive Advantage.” We summarized a main takeaway in this statement: “The same services that meet the unique needs of blind consumers often ‘delight’ other customers, thereby differentiating a brand and even offering competitive advantage.”

Since blind people lack at least some degree of sight, marketers must appeal to other senses like touch, smell, and taste. Of course, most sighted people also have these senses, and they similarly appreciate things that feel good, smell nice, and taste good. So, by integrating more senses for the benefit of blind people, marketers also increase their appeal to other consumers and differentiate themselves from competitors who don’t do the same.

McFarland maintains, “Play is a universal language that must be kept fully accessible for every child and child at heart.” Hopefully, increasingly creative toy design will see the introduction of more toys that tap into multiple senses for both inclusivity and profitability, which can be considered a playful approach to “Mindful Marketing.”

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Has Tipping Reached a Tipping Point?

8/26/2023

39 Comments

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

There are many ways people are rewarded for good work, but few are as immediate as monetary tips. Restaurant servers have long received confirmation and big parts of their compensation from gratuities, but recently many other service providers have started tapping the same propensity for generosity. Given that these increasingly common appeals have become off-putting to some, it may be time to ask: Has tipping been taken too far?

The New York Times recently described a case in which, after some cosmetic medical treatments, a reader’s dermatologist asked her for a tip. If some physicians are soliciting gratuities, is it only time until other professionals start doing the same? Should professors like me put out tip jars?

We’ve all added a tip to a restaurant check, handed cash to a bellhop, or Venmoed a little extra money to another service provider. While physical tip jars have become increasingly common on retail store counters, digital technology has made it extremely easy for anyone accepting electronic forms of payment, in person or from afar, to casually ask for extra cash.

For instance, I recently placed an online order to pick up dinner from Chipotle. When I went to check out, just below the order total a prompt appeared: “Tip the Crew – Show some love to the team that prepares your order.” As I’ve grown accustomed to doing, I clicked one of the tip amounts but not without thinking, “Do I really need to?”

A decade or two ago, one would usually only tip in a sit-down restaurant where a waiter or waitress took your order, brought your drinks and food, stopped by your table to see if you needed anything else, delivered the check, and processed your payment. As the word “gratuity” suggests, your tip was a way of saying thanks for their multipronged service, and the amount you gave was a way of expressing how good you thought the service was.

In the case of Chipotle, no one did any of the aforementioned things for me, so it seemed reasonable to wonder, “Who exactly am I tipping and why?” The easy answers to these questions are the restaurant staff that prepared the food and placed it in the carryout containers because they work hard for low wages, but even if those inputs and circumstances warrant tipping, how similar are they to those of other occupations that are also now panning for tips, including at least one dermatologist?

The complexities and potential inequities in tipping are further illustrated in examples like this one in Sanibel, FL. A couple of years ago, Island Cow, a popular restaurant on the island, was ordered to pay $222,000 to 48 employees because it created an illegal tip pool that “required tipped employees to share earnings with non-tipped workers, including dishwashing assistants and kitchen expeditors.”

This incident and others like it prompt a variety of questions and concerns including:

Do tips always make it to their intended parties?
Do owners sometimes pocket tips for themselves?
Do workers who don’t deal directly with customers deserve to be tipped?
Why don’t companies just pay their employees more so they don’t need to receive tips?

The last question may simply seem hypothetical, but a recent visit to Europe reminded me how services can be delivered effectively with just base pay and little or no tipping. A few times, when dining out in France, I received my check, which had no place to add gratuity. When I asked how I could leave a tip, the waiter/waitress replied that tipping wasn’t necessary.

Of course, that norm is not indicative of every restaurant in France, and it’s certainly not true across all Europe, where the likelihood of tipping varies widely from rather unlikely in Norway (14.3%) and France (39.9%) to very likely in Sweden (82.8%) and Germany (96.7%).

Whether in the United States or abroad, the total wages that service providers earn should have some bearing on whether or not they’re tipped. While the question of whether customers are being asked to subsidize the poor wages from employers is a fair one, it also might be moot because when employers are forced to pay higher wages, they often pass those increased costs on to customers in the form of higher prices.

So why not do away with tipping entirely and just pay more for restaurant meals, etc.? Theoretically, tipping provides value to customers because it allows them to adjust the amount they pay based on the quality of service they receive. Meanwhile, service providers have an incentive to do their jobs better, as they gain feedback about how well they’re performing. However, in reality, those benefits may not accrue for several reasons:

Feelings of obligation: Even if service is very poor, patrons may feel obligated to offer an average tip, so they don’t seem cheap or unempathetic.
Product prices: When customers believe they’re already paying a lot for something, they’ll sometimes scale back their tips – like the person who told me that while they typically tip for everything, they don’t always tip at Starbucks because they’re already paying $5.00 for a coffee.
Poor timing: As suggested by my Chipotle example above, some companies ask for tips before the service has been completed. In those cases, your order may come out completely wrong, but you’ve already given a tip.

Despite several decades of work experience, I’ve never been in an occupation that received tips, which made me eager to hear from those who have. So, I reached out to two of my current students who have considerable food industry server experience.

Sarah Schall has worked in a variety of retail occupations, including as a counter-service food worker and as a waitress. She makes the important point that particularly in a sit-down restaurant, one’s overall dining experience is a function of many employees’ contributions, which should impact how patrons approach tipping:

“Although the waiter/waitress is the one who may seem to be in charge of a guest’s entire experience, it’s important to remember that there are many team members who go into creating a dining experience. Therefore, it wouldn’t be right to lower the tip that’s going to the server if the food took a while due to a slow kitchen staff.”

“If the food wasn’t up to par, or if it took a long time to get to the table, it most likely was the kitchen staff at fault rather than the waitress. Instead of leaving a poor tip, guests should inform the waiter/waitress that they were disappointed with their meal so that way the restaurant can improve and the server can work to reconcile the problem.”

Josh McCleaf grew up in the restaurant industry, working in a variety of front- and back-of-house positions in his family’s multigenerational restaurant. This experience has given him particular appreciation for the multifaceted and prolonged engagement servers have with customers in traditional dining:

“When you sit down at a table-service restaurant, you expect your server to spend the next 45 to 90 minutes getting you drinks, refills, meals, extra napkins, sides of ranch, and anything else you might need for your dining experience. It's also important to note that your server is not only fulfilling the needs of your table during your visit, they are also trying to fill the needs of every other table in their section at the same time.”

McCleaf contrasts this typical sit-down dining scenario with his own recent experience as a counter-service customer:

“A few weeks ago, I walked up to a Cinnabon stand in a mall to purchase two bottles of water. While the transaction was short and the water was only an arm's length away from the cashier, I was still faced with the increasingly popular iPad flip and a prompt asking me if I'd like to leave a tip. I have to admit that this put me in an odd position, and I was left to answer some questions: Was this one-minute interaction and simple order worthy of a 20% tip? Even if it wasn't, how bad would it look if I said no?”

McCleaf likens this incident to experiences patrons have at quick-service restaurants where interactions last for just three to five minutes and are “one and done,” i.e., people order, pay, receive their food, and leave, which is much different than the sustained engagement with servers in sit-down dining.

However, McCleaf emphasizes that even in these faster service restaurant formats, good customer service is vital, as servers who demonstrate dedication to their work, strong communication skills, enthusiasm, and patience may be well-deserving of tips. He concludes:

“What's important is that you tip at your own discretion. You should never be guilted into leaving a tip at these kinds of establishments.”

His admonition is a good one: guilt, fear, and other strong-handed emotional appeals represent coercion and aren’t appropriate for marketers to use. I’d add that organizations should be sensitive to how the tipping choices they offer, or don’t, can remove customers’ control and force their decision-making.

For instance, our family recently ate at a sit-down dining restaurant where when paying the bill, the lowest tip listed among the iPad’s preset choices was 20%. While I was happy to offer more than that amount, and I believe that servers deserve more for the hard work they do, it struck me as being too prescriptive – Why shouldn’t a patron be able to more easily offer any amount that reflects their satisfaction with the service they received?

To be true to its nature and intent, tipping must remain a discretionary thing – while it certainly should be encouraged, it shouldn’t be compelled.

Anyone who has the ability to tip generously should do so, but ultimately, consumers deserve: 1) to decide without pressure how much they’d like to tip, 2) to make their choice, ideally, after they’ve received the service, and 3) to know, with some assurance, who will receive their gratuity. Discounting these ingredients for equitable tipping is a recipe for “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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What's to Like about Twitter's Rebrand

8/6/2023

13 Comments

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

“There’s nothing I like about it,” said a family member after seeing a large brown sun sail I bought to shade our backyard patio. I actually appreciated the blunt assessment because I also had misgivings about the tarp-looking sail, which fortunately was easy to return. Many have similarly bemoaned Twitter’s unexpected rebranding, which won’t be as easy as the unappealing patio shade to retract, but are there actually things to like about “X”?

Like a quick-moving summer thunderstorm that seems to emerge from nowhere, Twitter’s announcement that it was replacing its acclaimed name and famous bird with the moniker/graphic “X” seemed to catch even the most astute business analysts by surprise.

In reality, the curious move was several months, if not years in the making. This past April new-owner Elon Musk formally changed the company’s legal name to X Corp. He also had gained ownership of X.com six years earlier, which makes one think that the rebrand was more of a long-term plan than a knee-jerk reaction to Musk-revival and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent launch of Threads.

Regardless the timing or the reason, to say the response to Twitter’s rebrand has been critical is certainly an understatement. Some of the criticism has included:

‘”Completely irrational’: By changing Twitter’s name, Elon Musk is wiping out $4 billion to $20 billion in brand value” – Fortune

“This sudden transformation poses a significant obstacle for marketers who had been relying on the platform as part of their social media strategies.” – Digiday

“It’s rare for corporate brands to become so intertwined with everyday conversation that they become verbs. It’s rarer still for the owner of such a brand to announce plans to intentionally destroy it.” – AdAge

“I am concerned that Musk will continue to make random changes to the platform, either alienating more casual users of the service who tend to be people my company would market to, or change the advertising tools that allow us to target users.” – Brian Chevalier-Jordan, CMO at National Business Capital

All of the above seem like valid criticisms; however, the last one appears to have forgotten the remarkable number of successful business innovations Musk has to his credit:

The Boring Company
Neuralink
PayPal
Tesla
SpaceX

In addition, Musk founded OpenAI in 2015, and more recently he launched a new AI company xAI.

All this to say, Musk and those who work with him are likely extremely competent people. You can’t build the world’s leading brand of electric vehicle and launch people into space without having significant engineering and business acumen.

Given Musk’s elite team members and track record, maybe the rebrand from Twitter to X is some kind of marketing rocket science that’s beyond the ability of casual observers and even most marketing professionals to understand.

I have no inside information on Musk’s strategy, but here are a few considerations that may have gone into the surprising decision:

1) Appeal to Gen Z: Overtime, virtually every brand loses followers simply because its core demographic’s wants and needs change as it gets older and those consumers age out of the market. So, companies constantly need to be making inroads with the next generation, which is about to age into the market.

As someone who works with many Gen Zs, my sense is that Twitter has been falling out of favor with them, not unlike Facebook has with this young age cohort. Maybe a younger, hipper feeling brand would help them reconsider.

2) Restore Relevance: Even consumers whose needs haven’t changed can grow tired of a brand over time. Most of us experience this kind of satiation effect whether it’s with the music we listen to or the food we eat.

To avoid stagnation or worse, customers switching to other firms’ products, brands sometimes will attempt a refresh so they’re perceived as new and exciting, like Jell-O did recently for the first time in ten years.

Aside for some minor tweaks, it didn’t seem like Twitter had changed much over the last decade, so maybe a major brand refresh was in order, not just for Gen Zs but for every user who was growing bored with the brand.

3) Regain Attention: Brands want to be top-of-mind, which helps in their ongoing efforts to retain and grow business. When consumers stop hearing about them, they may stop thinking about them and purchasing from them.

Simply slipping out of the news cycle is bad enough; it’s even worse to be replaced by a competitor, which is what happened to Twitter thanks to Meta’s new Threads.

These three are realistic reasons for Twitter to consider rebranding, but as the earlier criticisms implied: Was this refresh worth the very high costs?

Perhaps no cost loomed larger than this one AdAge and others identified: Abandoning the verb to “tweet.” Very, very few organizations are ever so fortunate as to have their brands turned into verbs, e.g., Google, Photoshop.

Of course, firms need to be careful that their brand names aren’t used generically to represent the entire product category (e.g., calling any brand of tissue a Kleenex), which can lead to a firm losing its legal trademark protection.

Still, there is tremendous value to having so much mindshare with consumers that they turn the noun of a company into an action. It’s hard to imagine that any or all of the three refresh reasons would warrant Twitter abandoning that extremely unique competitive advantage.

There’s also a perceptual disconnect between what social media typically stands for and the psychological meaning of “X.” Social media such as Twitter, tend to be about connecting people and having conversations, whereas “X” often represents the opposite. For instance, an “X” is often a person with whom one no longer associates, e.g., X-spouse, X-roommate, etc.

Ironically, “X” is also the tiny symbol that people often click on to close a webpage or an app. In fact, if someone says, “X out of that,” we know they’re giving a command to close something digital. In short, changing people’s existing interpretations of “X” from negative to positive is a very tall order.

Musk is among the most talented entrepreneurs of this generation, and he may deserve to be counted among humanity’s most innovative thinkers, but even business savants sometimes make mistakes, for instance:

Henry Ford’s first automobile firm, the Detroit Automobile Company, failed miserably, leading him to bankruptcy.
Walt Disney was fired from his job at a newspaper because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple, the company he co-founded.

Perhaps hindsight will prove 20/20, and history will exonerate the Twitter/X rebrand a few years or more from now. Now, though, it looks like it may go down as one of Musk’s bigger mistakes and an unfortunate instance of “Simple-Minded Marketing.”

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13 Comments

How Data Analytics Find You

7/19/2023

23 Comments

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

As a marketing educator, I take some pride in understanding organizations’ marketing and sharing it with others. However, two unexpected emails from unfamiliar online retailers left this professor perplexed and led me to reach out to a former student to teach me what had happened.

It was a Saturday evening when the emails hit my inbox within minutes of each other. They caught my attention because both were from furniture retailers that I never heard of before. Although I hadn’t been shopping for furniture, I knew my wife had been online helping our son find furnishings.

I asked her if she recognized the retailers. She said she had visited their websites earlier that day but hadn’t purchased anything or provided any contact information. Nonetheless, she also had started receiving emails from them.

Most of us have experienced the remarketing that happens when we search for a specific product online and soon after, ads for the same product start appearing on webpages we visit. However, that kind of digital targeting is typically confined to websites; it doesn’t lead to us receiving emails since we didn’t provide an email address.

While I was surprised that my wife had received emails from the two retailers, I was baffled by how I’d been added to their lists.

I understood that it’s easy for companies to access data linking our email addresses to our internet protocol (IP) address, “the unique identifying number assigned to every device connected to the Internet.” That connection is evident each time we complete an online form that asks for our email address, among other personal information.

Companies that don’t harvest that data themselves also can buy it from those who do. The market for data brokering is huge – now a $138.9 billion industry that’s expected to top $229 billion by 2025.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Google, as well as credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, are among the biggest players in the data collection market. These organizations often say they don’t sell customer data; rather, they “share” it with their advertising partners. Of course, advertisers pay these big data collecting companies to run their ads, so selling vs. sharing seems like semantics.

Having exhausted the extent of my digital data-sharing knowledge, I turned to an expert. Dan Shaffer was once a BIS major and a student in my Marketing Principles class. He’s since risen to Director of Marketing Operations at WebFX one of the world’s leading digital marketing companies. I asked him how the two furniture retailers, who were completely unknown to me, could have gotten my email address.

Shaffer said that the companies were likely using https://retention.com/ to tie my IP back to my email addresses via brokered data – a process that started when at some point my email address and IP address were paired, probably from an online form I filled or an email newsletter to which I subscribed sometime ago.

Even though my wife and I use different devices to access the Internet, and each device has its own unique IPv6, the first 14 digits of that number are the same for every device in our household. So, a company with data from both my wife and from me could connect our datasets and target not just an individual shopper but as Shaffer described, our “household’s browsing history and interests.”

So, to summarize, the two unknown furniture retailers found me by using a very specialized analytics service (Retention.com) that: cross-referenced myriads of data it either harvested itself or purchased from others, found correlations among my wife’s and my separate online activities, and used those connections to paint a digital picture of our household.

That’s a simplified view of what happened and how. Given the moral focus of Mindful Marketing, the bigger question is, should it have happened? Was it right for the two furniture retailers and Retention.com to put my wife on their email list and target me?

It’s interesting that Retention.com dedicates an entire webpage to answering the question, How is Retention.com Legal? Who else does that? Does your employer take time to explain why it’s legal? An organization that does so naturally makes us ask: Should I be worried? Are there reasons why this business may not be legitimate?

Retention.com makes a case for the legitimacy of its practices with a variety of alleged facts including:

According to the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 you do NOT need an opt-in to send email marketing in the USA. In Europe, you do; but in the US, you don’t.
To be CAN-SPAM compliant, all you need is an opt-out link in the communication, and you need to make it clear that it’s an advertisement, along with a few other requirements (see below).

The webpage goes on to discuss that the conventional definition of SPAM is email that is both unsolicited and bulk. However, Retention.com argues against that definition because although it comes from Spamhaus, which is “an important, and influential organization in Email Marketing,” “Spamhaus is NOT the US government.”

At the same time, Retention.com also claims that it complies with Spamhaus’ definition because it provides “verifiable consent, ie, a third-party opt-in date and time, and the URL of our partner website that they opted in to.”

Furthermore, the site argues that the emails sent thanks to its services comply with the main requirements of the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM act:

No false or misleading header information
No deceptive subject lines
Identifying the message as an ad
Telling recipients where the sender is located
Telling recipients how to opt out of receiving future emails
Honor opt-out request promptly
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf

To Retention.com’s credit, I can confirm that the emails I received from the two furniture retailers complied with most of the seven stipulations above. However, one significant falsity appeared at the top of each email: “You’re receiving this email because you stopped by our site. Unsubscribe”

Before I received the first email from them, I didn’t even know these retailers existed; I certainly never visited their websites.

Given that my wife did browse the sites, perhaps the retailer and Retention.com could argue that “you” is plural, i.e., ‘you people,’ or ‘your household.’ Of course, even individuals in the same family or household often have very different personalities, preferences, and internet use patterns.

Why would a company want to risk annoying, alienating, or even offending potential customers, given the possibility that by targeting households one of the following could happen:

Spoil a surprise – What if my wife was hoping to surprise me with some new piece of furniture? Well, she can’t now!
Reveal sensitive information – Others don’t need to know that someone in their household is looking into treatment for a certain medical condition or for an attorney, a therapist, protection from domestic abuse, etc.

Besides being dishonest (“you stopped by our site”), it seems like Retention.com and these furniture retailers are taking a step backward in terms of best practices in marketing.

Ever since marketing began as a science in the mid-1900s, marketers have continually worked to refine their target markets, i.e., tailor them more and more to the needs of specific individuals vs. amorphous groups.

Now that digital media have enabled true one-to-one marketing and mass customization, why turn back the clock?

At the same time, I realize that Retention.com, like many digital marketers, is playing a numbers game. It doesn’t need to get my business for its clients. As long as its shotgun approach gets 15-20% of recipients to open the unsolicited emails and even smaller percentages to visit the retailers’ sites and make purchases, it’s probably providing ROI.

On its ‘right to exist’ page, Retention.com poses a rhetorical question that compares Spamhaus’ guidance to what’s legal:
Why abide by this definition, even though it’s considerably more restrictive than the law?

This question cuts to the heart of the difference between law and ethics and evokes a time-honored moral truism: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

First, there is at least one reason to believe that Retention.com’s practices do run afoul of the law, specifically concerning the Federal Trade Commission’s standard for truth in advertising, which mandates that “Under the law, claims in advertisements must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair . . .” (1) Since I never visited the two furniture retailers’ sites, to say I did is blatantly untruthful.

Second, even if Retention.com is given a legal pass, it’s practices still raise moral questions, e.g., What really represents ‘opting in,’ and how might less-than-transparent and/or manipulative systems mislead or coerce consumers?

For instance, at some point months or years before, my wife and/or I may have clicked “yes” on terms-of-use agreements that in an array of opaque legalese said that certain companies could “share” our customer information.

Is there really informed consent when you have 1) practically no idea with whom your data will be shared and for what purposes and 2) you’ve been shopping online for a long time, the terms-of-use agreement is the last thing you need to check off before completing the purchase, and the agreement is 10 pages long, in 8-point type, single-spaced?

Just because a company like Retention.com can “legally” assimilate reams of data, find connections, and sell those association services to others, should it? Instances of deception and possible coercion suggest, “no.”

Despite my own unpleasant experience and critical analysis, Retention.com probably is helping to convert a small percentage of surprised email recipients to customers for its clients, making its data amalgamation and email inundation approach “Single-Minded Marketing.”