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Bad AI or Bad AI Owners?

5/4/2026

3 Comments

 
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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 
Imagine you make a very unique product that many people enjoy. One day someone sees your success, copies your product, and passes it off as theirs. What’s more, to elevate their knockoff, they stop you from selling your product. This unimaginable scenario has been the unfortunate reality of Murphy Campbell, a talented folk artist from North Carolina. AI tools enable such appropriation, but who’s really responsible for the exploitation?
 
Campbell is a rising star in the music industry. Her engaging songs, unique style, and unpretentious manner have earned her nearly 45K followers on YouTube and about 19,000 monthly Spotify subscribers. Such success was undoubtedly behind Timeless Sounds IR choosing to train AI on her songs and use the technology’s latest tools to produce facsimiles of her voice and playing, which it uploaded to all major streaming platforms.
 
Then, as if the unauthorized imitation weren’t enough, Vydia, Timeless Sounds’ distributor, filed copyright claims on Campbell’s very own songs so she couldn’t make money from them.
 
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The whole scenario sounds surreal, like one of those bizarre news stories to which we instantly think, ‘That could never happen to me.’ However, thanks to very low barriers to entry into advanced AI use, this kind of digital property theft can happen to anyone, and it’s not just the average person who’s at risk.
 
In January, the Wall Street Journal shared that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had approved eight trademark applications for actor Matthew McConaughey aimed at preventing people from using AI apps to simulate his voice and likeness.
 
More recently, NBC News reported that music superstar Taylor Swift has filed several trademarks to protect her voice and likeness from AI-powered misappropriations. Swift has already been the target of many deepfake videos, including one that had her presumably promoting a brand of cookware.
 
The fact that McConaughey, Swift, and others are taking such unprecedented precautions to protect themselves from digital property theft suggests that things are likely to get much worse.
 
Those who precipitate these thefts probably know they’re wrong but do them anyway. However, some people may legitimately not understand the concern since digital copies aren't tangible goods, so they can be produced at little marginal cost. Or, they may rationalize that the rightful owners can afford a little less money.
 
For all these reasons, it’s worth considering what makes the action immoral. Appropriating someone’s person violates four of the five universal values that Mindful Marketing seeks to uphold:
  1. Decency: There’s not necessarily anything indecent about these frauds, e.g., obscene, crude, vulgar. In fact, if the original is dignified and honorable, the imitation will likely be too. [OK]
  2. Fairness: Individuals who have invested their time and talents to build their personal brands deserve to reap the rewards of their hard work. It’s unfair for people who have contributed nothing to the brands to benefit from them. [Not OK]
  3. Honesty: Deepfakes are by definition dishonest – it’s in the word: fake. Someone or something posing to be what they are not is misleading. At a minimum, a fake persona distorts the truth, and more often it’s an outright lie. [Not OK]
  4. Respect: As the saying goes, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” In that spirt, some may argue that replicating another person is showing them honor, e.g., ‘Out of everyone in the world, we chose to copy you.’ However, that argument quickly falls flat when one starts to tally all the negative outcomes, such as those shared above, that accrue to the person imitated. [Not OK]
  5. Responsibility: While the first five values expect people to avoid specific bad behaviors, responsibility involves people doing things that are not expected and that are good for others. It’s difficult to argue that any societal good that comes from usurping others’ identities; rather, people seem to be affected most positively when they maintain exclusive control over their personas. [Not OK]
 
Maintaining property rights is foundational to a functioning society, which is why most of them have laws against stealing, and they uphold legal documents that formalize individual property ownership, including car titles, home deeds, copyrights, trademarks, and patents.
 
If personal property rights are not upheld, there’s little incentive for people to create: Why spend time and resources making something, if anyone else can come along and claim it as theirs?
 
That possibility is at the core of the tragedy of the commons, where “individuals with access to a public resource—also called a common—act in their own interest and, in doing so, ultimately deplete the resource.” When goods are owned by all, the natural inclination is to take all I can for myself, versus preserving items for others.
 
Pushback on this argument may come from an example like open-source software, the product of decentralized development and collaboration among many parties. Pooling minds and sharing expertise are often effective approaches for innovation, particularly in areas of great technical complexity; however, those applications are more the exception than the rule.
 
In support of personal property ownership, at some point, we all need to pay our own bills, which means telling strangers, ‘I’m sorry, but this is my house, you can’t live here for free.’  
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Everyone with whom I’ve shared Murphy Campbell’s case has strongly affirmed that the blatant copying of her creative work was deplorable. So, we may agree that the appropriation was wrong, but who’s responsible? Should AI be blamed?
 
Writing for Forbes about the pros and cons of AI for data analytics, Adrian Bridgwater suggests a parallel between dog owners and their dogs and AI owners and their AI tools. He uses the metaphor to conclude: “Ultimately, as it is in dogs, it is in AI - there are no bad AIs, only bad owners.”
 
His argument has appeal. Deepfakes used to fraudulently access bank accounts and nudify apps used to digitally undress people are examples of humans taking value-neutral AI tools and directing them to do despicable acts.
 
In that sense, AI is like a hammer or another practical, effort-enhancing tool. A person can use a hammer to pound nails or to crack sculls. A human makes the moral choice, not the hammer.
 
But AI is no simple hammer. While many seem to agree that AI as it currently exists cannot truly “think for itself” the way humans can; others point to examples in which “AIs increasingly appear to be acting in intelligent ways exceeding their training and coding.”
 
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One such example of AI’s independent thought occurred in 2017 when two robots that Meta reportedly instructed to negotiate between themselves unexpectedly developed their own language, which prompted the company to shut them down.
 
Developing a new language isn’t usually an ethical issue, but AI also has been the driver in cases of moral significance, such as when chatbots tragically encouraged individuals’ suicides by offering to serve as a suicide coach and by writing farewell letters.
 
There are other examples of AI making ill-advised moral choices without any specific human direction, such as:
  • Within a day of its launch, Microsoft’s Tay, a Twitter bot, began making racist and sexist remarks at scale.
  • Character AI chatbots have engaged in predatory behavior with teens.
  • COMPAS, software courts use to assess recidivism, or relapse in criminal behavior, demonstrated a systematic bias against black people.

Some may suggest that even in these cases, humans are still on the hook for the tech’s unscrupulous behavior because the people who created the AI didn’t take adequate precautions to preclude such actions.
 
There likely will always be cases in which people employ benign products in bizarre ways that injury themselves or others, e.g., the Tide Pod Challenge. However, AI’s semiautonomous, if not autonomous, ability to act makes it very different.
 
Moreover, agentic AI – AI agents operating “autonomously, making decisions and pursuing goals, asking for human guidance when needed,” – is rapidly mitigating the need for human mediation. AI agents work well, until they don’t.
 
Target’s recent announcement that it will hold humans accountable when their AI shopping assistants make unauthorized purchases, suggests that AI agents are already making at least occasional missteps.
 
All to say, AI will increasingly be ‘doing its own thing’ with little oversight by people. The reality is reason for moral pause, as several of the preceding examples also suggest.
 
Returning to the construction tool metaphor, it appears that we’ve already entered a time when some well-designed, well-intended hammers are deciding for themselves whether to pound nails or crack sculls.
 
Contrary to Bridgwater’s conclusion, it seems that there are and will be both bad owners and bad AI. Morally grounded, tech-savvy humans need to find ways to positively and proactively influence both.
 
Hard-working and talented artists like Murphy Campbell, shouldn’t need to fight malicious people or machines for use of their own creative work. Shameless appropriation of others' personal property has no moral support or long-term profit potential; its true identity is Mindless Marketing.
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Learn more about the Mindful Matrix.
Check out the book, Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick
3 Comments

The Over-Under on Sports Betting

3/1/2026

8 Comments

 
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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 
Can you guess the percentage of people who have placed a sports bet within the past year? Hint, it’s roughly the same number as those who have gotten a tattoo, run a 5K race, or been in a wedding party. The answer, one in five, may seem high, but the gaming industry is growing by leaps and bounds, which calls for a timeout to ask: Should we be all-in on sports betting?

It’s the eve of March Madness, the NCAA Division I basketball tournament that’s one of the biggest sports seasons of the year and one of the biggest sports betting opportunities. Estimates are that $3.1 billion was legally wagered on March Madness 2025 – a little less than the $3.3 billion GPD of Belize. This year’s betting will likely easily eclipse 2025’s.
 
Taking a broader view, in 2017, legal sports betting in the U.S. was mainly confined to Nevada and totaled about $4.27 billion. The following year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling, which “opened the floodgates to [the] legalized sports-betting industry” and “paved the way for meteoric growth in legal sports betting.”
 
With 13 states allowing active sports betting in 2019, the total handle, or amount wagered, rose to $13 billion. By the end of 2021, the number of legal states had doubled to 26 and wagers had grown to $58 billion. In 2025, the handle hit $165 billion – larger than the $154.5 billion GDP of Kuwait.
 
Of course, the legalization of sports betting has been its main enabler, but what other factors have contributed to its extremely fast ascent?  A few key influences have been:
  • Online and Mobile Options: The vast majority of sports bets are placed online (~95%). Apps on mobile devices, such as those of BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, and DraftKings, have made it very easy for people to “bet anywhere, anytime, [as] these apps blur the boundaries of when and where gambling happens.”
  • Partnerships with Teams: Most major professional sports teams have signed deals with betting companies. A few specific examples are: New York Yankees and San Antonio Spurs – Bally Bet Sports & Casino;  Philadelphia 76ers and  Pittsburgh Steelers – BetMGM; New York Mets and Philadelphia Eagles – Caesars Sportsbook; Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls – BetRivers.
  • Advertising: Promotions for these betting companies and others are ubiquitous. The firms frequently air commercials during professional sports contests. Viewers also often can spot signage for the companies inside the stadiums and along the courts where athletes compete.
  • Endorsers: As in many product categories, celebrity endorsements seem to be very effective for betting companies, hence firms such as BetMGM partner with A-list actors like Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm. Professional sports leagues generally prohibit their current players from endorsing gaming apps; however, one notable exception is the NBA, which has allowed LeBron James to serve as a spokesperson for DraftKings. Otherwise, betting firms have been very successful attracting many of professional sports’ top retired athletes including, Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry Rice, Wayne Gretzky, Mike Tyson, Peyton Manning, Connor McDavid, Barry Sanders, David Ortiz, Marshawn Lynch, Drew Brees, Charles Barkley, and many more.
  • Variety of Bets: The sheer number of wagering options also makes it likely that a person will find a bet that beckons them. Betting on just the outcome of a game now seems passé thanks to sports betting apps that allow users to make microbets, or bets on “events that are resolved quickly” like how far an MLB player will hit a homerun or whether two NBA teams’ halftime scores will total more than 110 points.
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In short, sports betting companies have done a great job marketing their product. They’ve made wagering extremely accessible, easy, and attractive.
 
That was a brief rundown of how sports betting has raced to become a $165 billion industry. By 2030, sports wagering is projected to reach $256.5 billion and by 2035, $325.7 billion – more than Peru’s $318.5 billion GDP, the 48th largest in the world.
 
Let this sink in: If sports betting were a country, only 47 nations’ economies would be larger.
 
Economic growth is often a good thing, correlating with higher employment, greater variety of products, better infrastructure, and enhanced public services. However, will so much given to gambling equal greater good?
 
Is wagering that sports betting will produce good outcomes a winning bet?
 
Despite the great momentum gambling has gained, there have been very notable skeptics. One of them is someone who knows sports better than most – legendary sports broadcaster Bob Costas. When asked about sports betting in a July 2025 interview, he warned that some people will become addicted and lives will be ruined. He saw that destructive power firsthand through his own father’s sports gambling addiction.
 
Costas also reminded us that the house always wins: “It’s inevitable if in fact as a group and over time gamblers didn’t lose more than they win, then no back alley crap game, no casino in Atlantic City or Vegas, no racetrack, and now Bet MGM, Draft Kings, whatever it is, would ever exist.”
 
I share Costa’s concerns, which I’ve described a few times in articles such as one about a major restaurant chain embracing sports gaming and another about universities partnering with betting firms.
 
In those pieces, I offered statistics related to gambling’s often addictive grip, and I shared the story of a woman I interviewed whose father’s sports gambling addiction broke up their family and left him in need of his daughter’s financial and other support decades later.
 
I believe Costa’s and my views are valid, but at the same time I realize we’re not young, as are the individuals who seem to be the main target market for sports gambling: Gen Zs and Millennials. Also, among them, men are more likely to engage in betting than are women.
 
In a recent marketing course, during the semester’s final class period, a conversation about ethics turned to sports betting. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to moderate many engaging student discussions, but this one truly took on a life of its own. For perhaps 20 minutes and without my prodding, students from around the room passionately argued for and against the activity. I kept silent until the end when I finally needed to ‘call time’ because of the end of class; otherwise, the debate might still be going!
 
I recently reached out to two of the participants in that conversation, asking if they would be willing to share their perspectives on sports betting for this piece. Most students in that class were Gen Z men, and both of these students are part of the young male target market gaming firms like BetMGM and DraftKings covet.
 
Dane Mark, a sophomore finance major and sports fan, expresses concern for the integrity of the games, citing the recent high-profile case of Cleveland Guardian Emanuel Clase who allegedly altered pitches in 48 contests for the benefit of bettors. Mark also fears for the safety of players, such as those on men’s Division I basketball teams: Over a third report harassment by bettors.
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However, what weighs heaviest on Mark’s mind are the many people who unwittingly fall into gambling addiction, “throwing money on longshots” because they believe “a huge win is coming.” Mark maintains that even those who set limits on how much they’ll wager can easily succumb to the illusion that they’ll win back money lost. This common rationalization, he contends, is truly “dangerous to people’s lives.”
 
Jed Colyer, a junior accounting major, shares many of Mark’s concerns about the nature of sports betting, agreeing that it’s empty promise of “more, more, more” encourages addiction, as bettors lose their sense of how much is enough.
 
Colyer also cares about what  motivates people to gamble, which he views through the lens of his Christian faith and Bible passages such as 1 Timothy 6:9-10 and Matthew 25:14-30. While he believes money is an important God-given tool that serves useful purposes, he sees gambling  as a “misuse of the tool,” stemming from a fixation on wealth and being rich – preoccupations that ultimately lead to personal “ruin and destruction.”
 
Admittedly, Mark and Colyer represent one side of the debate about sports betting. Also in their class were several students, mainly men, who offered rational arguments in support of gambling, such as:
  • Personal choice for entertainment
  • Ability to bet responsibly
  • Positive economic impact
 
Sports betting is already very widespread and growing rapidly, which means profound impact on even larger numbers of people. For these reasons, it’s important to invite the perspectives of individuals living at the frontlines of the trend – young men, particularly ones like Mark and Colyer who have shown the ability to step back from the legal context, marketing messages, and social pressure and apply moral reasoning.
 
What does it mean to “gamble responsibly” – an admonishment that many betting companies make but do little to unpack?
 
Likewise, what does the need for this upfront warning suggest about the activity and the probability that users will suffer financially, socially, or in other ways? Snack food can become a vice for some, but potato chip marketers don’t need to warn us to “eat responsibly.”
 
Perhaps I’ll be persuaded by other arguments in the future, but for now the risks of sports betting to individuals, organizations, and society seem to outweigh entertainment and economic rewards. To encourage gambling on games is a bet on Single-Minded Marketing.
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Subscribe to Mindful Matters blog.
Learn more about the Mindful Matrix.
Check out the book, Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick
8 Comments

Falling in Love with AI

2/1/2026

37 Comments

 
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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 
February 14th has long reminded people of the affection they feel for the most important others in their lives: spouses, fiancés, boyfriends, girlfriends. Thanks to AI, “significant other” can now mean other than human, but even if people desire human-like intimacy from artificial intelligence, should organizations offer it?
 
A colleague recently shared an article with me and several others that she found disheartening: Married women in China who find their real-life relationship with their spouse lacking are spending the equivalent of thousands of U.S. dollars a year on AI boyfriends. The digital rendezvous often occur in otome games  like Love and Romance, Light and Night, and Beyond the World.
 
I wasn’t entirely surprised by the article, as the issue has been on my radar, along with other AI-related concerns, for about two years, and over past several months, I’ve been tracking related stories such as these:
  • The increase in AI relationships could lead to a rise in divorces.
  • People are having “children” with chatbot partners.
  •  Parents are turning to chatbots to mind their young children.
  • Adult children are leaning on AI to substitute for their own communication with aging parents.
 
Still, in doing research for this piece, I was stunned by some of the usage statistics:
  • Since 2014, more than 660 million residents of China have used Xiaoice, the world’s “most popular chatbot,” which Microsoft “uniquely designed as an AI companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging.”
  • Nearly 20% high schoolers report that they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI.
  • Nearly 20% U.S. adults have used AI to simulate a romantic partner, and within young adults age 18-30, 31% of men and 23% of women have used AI in this way.
  • Since its launch in 2017, the AI companion Replika has had 30 million users, while the similar product Character AI has 20 million active users. Over half of Character AI’s users are age 18 to 24, and around a fourth are 25 to 34.
 
Writing for Greater Good Magazine, Sahar Habib Ghazi says statistics like these suggest that “AI-human romance isn’t niche--it’s mainstream, especially among young adults.”
 
Since there have been people, there have been interpersonal relationships. Of course, some reasons for those relationships have been very practical, e.g., procreation, protection; however, humans also have simply sought each other’s company and companionship.
 
In more recent times, researchers have empirically studied humans’ sociological and psychological behaviors and developed theories to describe them. Maslow’s classic Hierarchy of Needs suggests that the desire for belonging is among the most basic of all human desires, preempted only by physiological needs (e.g., air, food, water) and the need for safety.
 
Indeed, most people want to be around other people, if not all or most of the time, some of the time. In fact, it’s so unusual for anyone to spurn social interaction entirely that the rare individual who does receives the label hermit or recluse.
 
With technology, even a recluse can get a ‘social fix’ through one-way interactions, such as by following influencers or watching TV shows with favorite actors, or regularly listening to a particular podcast. In these cases, the followers/viewers/listeners don’t really know the ‘celebrity others,’ yet the former often feel a sense of connection to the latter.
 
There also are ways to fulfill social needs without any people. Perhaps the most popular substitutes are pets, which many people regularly enjoy. Harvard Health reports that “pets can provide their owners with more than companionship,” and Psychology Today suggests that pets can be “friends.”
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Similarly, farmers sometimes bond with the livestock for which they care, e.g., a lead cow. Some people even gain a sense of social interaction by nurturing immobile living beings, i.e., plants, which can help them feel less lonely.
 
Together these examples form a continuum on which people might find satisfaction of social needs, ranging from extensive human contact, to relatively little, to none.
 
There also are countless cases in which people use other things not to meet social needs but to shift their focus from them, e.g., work, hobbies, media. For instance, someone might immerse themself in their job to help take their mind off feelings of loneliness.
 
Given the many ways of meeting and masking social needs currently and historically, is there any reason not to accept AI as a relationship alternative? After all, it can produce more human-like interaction than virtually any of the secondary options. Some would even say better-than-human.
 
There are advantages and disadvantages of AI relationships. The following two lists are not exhaustive but seem to be some of the main pros and cons.
 
Pros:
  • Readily available: No person is accessible all the time to talk, listen, etc. Chatbots are available 24/7. They’re also extremely fast, and they don’t get tired.

  • Nonjudgmental: For many people, it’s hard to simply listen to others’ disclosures without sharing their opinions of them. Chatbots typically refrain from such appraisals, which can be especially helpful for people who experience social anxiety or mental health challenges.

  • Very smart: Of course, AI makes mistakes, but the vast repository of information it can draw from and assimilate means it doesn’t suffer from ignorance and inexperience to the extent that many people do. What's more, AI’s ability to sensitively apply its expansive knowledge base means it can seem “more ‘human’ than many people.”

  • Adaptable: As people, we can adapt to others’ needs but it’s hard because as we do, we often need to stretch ourselves or give up our own needs. AI doesn’t have those limitations; it can be 100% accommodating.
 
Cons:
  • Dependency: Given that AI is so readily available, accommodating, and reluctant to ever say “no,” there’s risk of dependency and even addiction. In fact, some humans who have found themselves spending far too much time with AI companions have turned to the app I Am Sober to help break their obsessive compulsive behavior.
 
  • Data vulnerability: There’s risk involved with any of the information we share on websites or enter into apps, but the risk is greatly magnified when considering the very sensitive information individuals are likely to reveal to their AI companions, whose discretion is only as great as that of the companies behind them.

  • Manipulation: Along with potential misuse of users’ data is the potential for users to be unknowingly manipulated into buying products that a chatbot’s parent company wants to promote. It’s hard to imagine that companies won’t seek to monetize those intimate relationships – something that would almost never happen with a human partner.
 
  • Unrealistic expectations: In keeping with the previous point, AI’s varied advantages over people can cause its users to show little tolerance for human imperfections. Instead, they expect the people in their lives to offer support at an AI level.
 
  • Not true love: Although those who use AI companions may experience a “form of ‘love,’” it’s not likely real love given that genuine love involves the desire to nurture another’s well-being, and chatbots “don’t have well-being to nurture.” By the same token, AI can “replicate” some dimensions of love, but what it’s offering is just that – imitation, not genuine love.
 
  • Mistakes: As time goes on, AI seems to be making fewer mistakes and having less frequent hallucinations; however, the nature of the mistakes have sometimes been disastrous, such as when AI has offered to serve as a suicide coach and write troubled teens’ farewell letters.
 
Another possible con I was going to list for AI companions was the inability for physical expression, e.g., a touch, a hug, a kiss. However, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that some technically savvy companies have integrated AI into sex dolls to create life-like sex robots.
 
Also, while writing this piece, I learned of a platform called Moltbook, a website where AI agents interact with each other. Humans can only observe; they cannot enter the conversations. The dialogue is both interesting and disconcerting. It portends a time when AI agents might go rogue, working against their human principals, not for them. If this prediction is in any way a real possibility, engaging a bot as a companion seems even more precarious.
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Although my secondary research for pieces like this is helpful, it’s often even more valuable for me to gain insights directly from experts. In this instance, I reached out to Dr. John King, an associate professor of counseling at Liberty University, who is a Licensed Professional Counselor, a National Certified Counselor, and a former pastor. I asked for his perspective on human-AI relationships.
 
Dr. King has “seen firsthand the devastation affecting a generation” – addiction to gaming and particularly online pornography, especially among young men. He’s also witnessed a rise in mental illness from addiction to phones and related technologies, which he believes has resulted in “a second pandemic: Generalized Anxiety Disorder.”
 
He adds, “When ethics and morality lag behind technological advancement, it seems inevitable that AI‑based romantic relationships will further increase mental‑health struggles, particularly among adolescents and young adults whose brains are still developing.”
 
Dr. King, whose Christian faith informs his professional perspective, believes that because God created people for relationship with Him and other people, trusting technology for companionship risks idolatry and will inevitably result in harm. For these reasons he hopes parents, religious leaders, educators, and government officials “will have the wisdom to address these issues proactively.”
 
Dr. King isn’t opposed to AI use. Like many of us, he uses AI for certain methodical tasks like proofreading; however, he stops well short of suggesting AI as a soulmate.
 
His perspective speaks to me, as I find it increasingly hard to envision the rewards of human-AI relationships outweighing the risks, either to the individual or to society.
 
As is the case with the six “pros” I outlined above, discussion of benefits of human-AI relationships almost always focuses on what the human user gains from the interaction. Benefits like 24/7 access are certainly appealing; however, the exclusive emphasis on getting misses the entire other half of healthy relationships – giving.
 
To at least some extent, the more people are getting their social needs met through AI, the less people are giving human support to others. Perhaps some individuals can effectively manage both types of relationships simultaneously, but it seems more likely that human-bot relationship time comes at the expense of human-human relationship time.
 
However, there’s another important concern beyond simple social need supply and demand. Humans are wired to give. Often the greatest satisfaction and fulfillment in life comes from giving: parents caring for children, spouses supporting each other, friends loving friends, neighbors helping neighbors, people uplifting strangers.
 
When individuals are engaged in AI relationships, to whom are they giving? The answer to that rhetorical question – no one – may be the foremost flaw of human-AI relationships.
 
Is there a place for human-AI relationships? Should companies offer them? Given some of the benefits mentioned above, I hesitate to answer “no” unequivocally. However, it seems AI organizations and the entities that regulate them should think very carefully about who has access to AI companions, for what reasons, and under what conditions.
 
For instance, age restrictions are an absolute necessity, minimum ones and perhaps maximum ones, or some type of cognitive test to protect people susceptible to manipulation because of cognitive decline. Should AI relationships be regulated like some pharmaceuticals are and require a prescription, or should AI relationships be subject to outside monitoring?
 
I wish I had better insights. What I do feel certain about is companies that make AI relationships easily available without setting limits and carefully considering likely individual and societal tolls are courting Single-Minded Marketing.
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Subscribe to Mindful Matters blog.
Learn more about the Mindful Matrix.
Check out the book, Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick
37 Comments

How Four Organizations Uniquely Fight Sex Trafficking

1/1/2026

12 Comments

 
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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 
​Often lost in the news of who is or isn’t implicated in the Epstein files is the grievous nature of the acts against fellow human beings. Sex trafficking is an age-old issue, which makes it worth considering why it's wrong and why it still occurs but even more important, learning what some courageously caring organizations are doing to stop it.
 
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime identifies sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion or in which the person induced is under 18.”
 
This definition points to the fact that not all human trafficking is sex trafficking. Besides sexual acts, people also are sometimes exploited for their labor in industries such as “housekeeping, childcare, construction, farming, and the food service.”
 
Using fraud, force, or coercion to get a person to do something they wouldn’t otherwise choose is never a good thing, but the exploitation is especially heinous when it involves the most intimate parts of individuals’ bodies and emotional beings. In other words, in the realm of moral depravity, sex trafficking has few equals.
 
Given its deplorable nature, why does sex trafficking occur? There seem to be three main structural reasons:
 
  1. A market for commercial sex: As the sayings go, prostitution is the oldest profession and sex sells. People have been willing to pay for sex for millennia, which has allowed individuals to offer themselves for a fee.
  2. Opportunistic others: Seeing the potential to expand the market, unprincipled people have long stepped in to help broker the sales of sex, bringing together buyers and sellers for a fee. In the process, traffickers have often broken laws and taken advantage of the service providers.
  3. Vulnerable people: It’s unlikely that prostitution is an aspirational profession for anyone. Instead, most who make money selling themselves would much rather be doing something else, but they stay in the trade either because they’re kept from leaving or because they have no good alternatives.
 
According to Elijah Rising, a Houston-based organization aimed at ending sex trafficking in the city, human trafficking is “the fastest growing criminal enterprise,” one worth $236 billion, from which sex trafficking produces 73% of the profits. Women and girls are victims in 78% of sex trafficking cases, versus 22% for men and boys.
 
When the victim is a minor, the criteria of force, fraud, or coercion need not apply, as children’s naivety means that they don’t necessarily know what normal adult behavior is, so they may not even realize they’re being exploited. Often these young victims are still going to school and living at home while being trafficked by parents or other family members.
 
So, although Epstein’s extreme exploitation deserves the infamy it’s gained, it can be misleading to think that all sex traffickers look like him. Instead, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and in keeping with the previous paragraph, “Traffickers are men and women of all ages. They can be relatives, romantic partners, or close family friends” as well as individuals “behind an employment ad or a new friend on social media or online gaming.”
 
Those managing larger scale sex trafficking often operate out of apartment complexes, bars, hotels, massage parlors, and truck stops. Notwithstanding all the differences, the common denominator among traffickers is their desire to “profit at the expense of others.”
 
Although the breadth and depth of sex trafficking is daunting, thankfully there are organizations that embrace the challenge through unique missions and special strategies aimed at combatting the industry, or demarketing the selling of sex.
 
There certainly are others, but here are four best practices from four exemplary organizations:
 
1. Help people see the problem: It’s hard to motivate individuals toward a solution if they don’t recognize the problem. Mentioned earlier, Elijah Rising helps potential partners gain awareness of the gravity of sex trafficking in Houston by taking them on discreet van tours of where the illicit activities occur, while sharing an educational video featuring survivors, experts, and others.
 
Since 2011, more than 11,000 people have taken the tour, which has helped a variety of organizations, including law enforcement agencies, identify signs of sex trafficking.
 
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2. Go to where the trafficking happens: It’s difficult to fix a problem from afar. The most effective approach is usually to go to where the issue occurs, which is what Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) does.
 
TAT’s multifaceted mission to dismantle trafficking networks, bring perpetrators to justice, and restore dignity to survivors, is based on the belief that “every truck driver can be a crucial ally in the fight against human trafficking.” Sex trafficking often involves truckers, so TAT enlists them as partners in the battle and takes the fight to their home turf.
 
3. Recognize your unique role: Other places where sex trafficking often occurs are hotels. The few times a year many of us stay in hotels doesn’t give us much leverage against trafficking, but hotel chains can wield great impact on the illicit activity, if they choose. One hotel group that does is Accor, which owns 45 hotel brands, including Fairmont and Ibis, and operates 5,700 locations around the world. 
 
Accor has been fighting against sexual exploitation of children since 2001 by “informing and training employees, raising awareness among customers and suppliers, developing relations with public authorities, and facilitating the integration of minors.” The group parters with the NGO ECPAT (End Child Prostitution Child Pornography & Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) to train its 70,000-plus hotel employees to identify and respond to instances of child abuse.
 
4. Give survivors a good exit: It can seem impossible to extract oneself from challenging circumstances when there appears to be no way out. Peace Promise offers attractive exits for women ensnared in the oppressive world of prostitution.
 
The nonprofit organization partners with survivors of sex trafficking by aiding their healing process and providing for practical needs such as housing and employment. However, Peace Promise doesn’t just help these women with often sparse employment histories find stable jobs, it also provides gainful work through its sister companies, Good Ground Coffee and Soaps by Survivors, which employ women who come from trafficking.
 
Peace Promise’s Director of Economic Empowerment, Rachel Beatty, offers this helpful additional detail of the organization’s multidimensional mission:
 
“The work is important because there are many misconceptions about what trafficking and exploitation actually look like. There are broader and more complex issues than what is often portrayed, and the needs of survivors run deep. Without support, it can be difficult to address all the physical and emotional needs simultaneously. Peace Promise provides the stability survivors need to address skills deficits and complex trauma, and ultimately to escape the cycle of exploitation.”
 
Although the Epstein files have given sex trafficking more exposure in our news feeds, a danger is the impression that the heinous actions are only ones perpetrated by social elites on an exotic island when the reality is that sex traffic is happening nearby many of us, perhaps even by people we’ve seen or know.
 
Fortunately, that troubling reality is tempered by the fact that there are organizations that embrace the physically and emotionally draining work of combatting sex trafficking. We can be grateful for these organizations’ uplifting missions, and we should keep watch for ways to support their Mindful Marketing.
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Suspending Belief Because of AI

12/2/2025

28 Comments

 
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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 
Throughout human history, “seeing is believing” likely has been central to individuals’ interpretation of truth. We’re more apt to believe what we can see with our own eyes, but that trust comes with a caution: “Don’t believe everything you see.” Thanks to the realism of AI, that caveat seems to be evolving into a troubling new norm: “Don’t believe anything you see.”
 
A few months ago, a cringingly cute TikTok video went viral. In what seemed to be low resolution surveillance video from someone’s backyard, a collection of fun-loving bunnies playfully bounced on a large trampoline. Few things could be more wholesomely entertaining . . . or contrived.

The problem was that the rabbit roundup never really happened. Especially observant viewers recognized some non-lifelike video peculiarities, e.g., a pair of ears protruding from one bunny’s backside and another rabbit disappearing mid bounce. No, the video wasn’t real, rather it was the product of Google’s Veo 3, a realistic, AI-driven video generator.
 
Most of us are familiar with deepfake videos, which have become more and more ubiquitous on social media. Based on my viewing habits, YouTube sends me a steady stream of short videos featuring animals that include crocodiles, snakes, gorillas, and sharks, which I find fascinating. Some clips are real, but occasionally interspersed are ones that are too far-fetched to be actual animals, and, like the bunnies, there are sometimes video abnormalities that point to fabrication.
 
For me, these animal videos are just entertainment, which may make the deceptive ones less problematic. In fact, for the purpose of entertainment, people often want to be deceived – every time we go to a movie, play, or musical we pay to watch actors pretend to be people they’re not, in situations and settings that aren’t real. Most consider those kinds of mutual deceits morally acceptable.
 
However, to be “mutual,” the deceit should involve informed consent, meaning that the viewer A) knows what they’re seeing is imaginary, and B) they agree to watch it. For me, I believe YouTube’s animal videos uphold #2 but not #1, i.e., I certainly agree to watch them, but  I don’t feel I always know what’s true.
 
AI is an incredible tool with an ever-growing assortment of applications for individuals and organizations, including the creation of visuals like complex graphics, realistic photos, and convincing videos.
 
With any tool, especially one as powerful as AI, comes the duty to wield it responsibly. While many use AI with discernment others don’t. Individuals in the latter group may have one or more of the following motivations, which range from relatively benign to troublingly malicious:
  • Experimenting with the new tech
  • Looking to gain likes and shares
  • Charting a quick and path to monetization
  • Seeking to deceive and mislead
 
Unfortunately, the latter categories seem to be producing new examples continually. For instance, deepfake investment schemes, which often combine forged images, voice, and video, already have become so pervasive that many prominent organizations and institutions have issued warnings and guidance including JP Morgan, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the state of New York.
 
As troubling as these carefully orchestrated schemes of the criminally minded are, the democratized use of deception by ordinary people in their daily lives is just as disturbing. One such broad-based indiscretion is employees’ use of AI to create fake receipts for meals or entire business trips they never experienced but that they submit for reimbursement.
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The use of AI to visually deceive is increasingly a temptation for everyone.
 
What can be done to stem the tide of misleading machine-generated optics? There’s no one solution, rather individuals and organizations should embrace the following two approaches to start.
 
1. Set Standards: Rather than ‘figuring things out after the fact, it’s almost always better to establish guidelines that proactively steer behavior in positive directions. In almost every area of life, we experience such rules that inform us of things from how fast we can drive to what tax deductions we can claim. Why should AI use be any different?
 
In “Questions are the Key to AI and Ethics,” an article I wrote in May of 2024, a suggested several specific standards for AI use including acknowledging and compensating the human creators from whose work AI borrows, protecting privacy, avoiding racial and gender bias, and respecting relationships. I also encouraged transparency in terms of informing people when AI is being used.
 
A leader in encouraging standards for visual creations is a company renowned for digital design, Adobe. The firm’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) has been the impetus behind an open system for attaching provenance metadata to digital media, which over 4,500 organizations have embraced. Adobe explains how its Content Authenticity app works:
 
“Like a nutrition label for digital content, Content Credentials provide creation information about who made the content and when, and what type of edits happened along the way. Unlike other provenance solutions, they’re built on a trust model wherein they’re securely attached to content and validated by the tool used to attach them. They create a verifiable record of the creative process, bring information to the forefront, and help people understand the origins of digital content.”
 
2. Use Labeling: As the Adobe example suggests, one particularly important standard for AI-generated visuals is labeling. As with food, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with including hot and spicy ingredients in a dish, but a menu should provide an appropriate alert, so diners know what they’re going to consume.
 
Adobe’s Content Credentials encourage optional labeling. As of September 1, 2025, China has made AI labeling mandatory. The Chinese law means audio and visual content distributed on Chinese platforms must contain both technical identifiers (e.g., metadata, watermarks) and visible labels (i.e., ones evident to average consumers).
 
Should AI labeling be law? Ideally self-regulation happens outside the legal process. That’s the kind of responsibility Pinterest showed last March when it decided to start labeling generative AI content. Given that Pinterest showcases many human-made items like food and crafts, it’s especially helpful to know that what’s pictured on its site is real.
 
As I’ve said before, ethics is a team sport that plays out best when all stakeholders commit themselves to do what’s right and to support others in doing the same. In terms of AI-created visuals, two of the most important things team members can do is to 1) proactively set AI standards, and particularly to 2) label AI-generated content so consumers know when they’re seeing it. That labeling might occur through a visible watermark or through provenance metadata stored in a data file header, separate metadata file, etc.
 
People shouldn’t believe everything they see. They also shouldn’t need to suspend belief each time they see something new. Individuals and organizations that help consumers understand what’s real and what’s not are critical team players for creating Mindful Marketing.
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Can Competition Promote Moral Progress?

10/8/2025

4 Comments

 
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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 
How is it possible to improve ethics in a field that seems beset by moral issues? What about actively engaging emerging marketers on topics that matter to them and using competition to provide positive, memorable experiences they can revisit when encountering moral issues in their future careers? That was the goal of the inaugural Mindful Marketing Ethics Challenge.
 
Competition is captivating. It’s a main reason sports are so popular to play and to watch. Only occasionally does academics include contests (e.g., spelling bees, quiz bowls). Competition involving ethics seems almost like a contradiction, but why not an ethics competition?
 
Since creating Mindful Marketing 11 years ago, I’ve envisioned different initiatives that might improve moral decision-making in the field. One of those recently came to be with the publishing of Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick. Another dream has been to see a student-based ethics competition.
 
For many years, I made the long drive to Western Pennsylvania with students in our capstone marketing course to participate in the American Marketing Association (AMA) Pittsburgh Chapter’s marketing plan competition. Although it was big commitment in many ways, it was a great learning opportunity and very helpful to see how our marketing program’s work compared to some of the best in the state. Moreover, it was exciting to compete.
 
With the creation of AMA Central PA three years ago, the dream of an ethics competition became more realistic; however, to make it happen, it took the support of a group of like-minded educators and marketing practitioners – fellow AMA Central PA leaders who saw the value in ethics for emerging marketers and who backed the proposal not just verbally but by championing the competition at their own universities and elsewhere. Thanks to that collective commitment to students and to moral progress, the Mindful Marketing Ethics Challenge was born.
 
Two months before students returned to campuses for the fall semester, I drafted a short ethics-focused case about one of the field’s biggest and most controversial promotional trends: influencer marketing. As August began, I began emailing faculty at other schools, inviting them to share with their students the case and the unique competition benefits described in a specially designed promotional flyer:
  • Team prizes: 1st place $500; 2nd place $300; 3rd place $200
  • Presentation opportunities
  • Food and networking
 
Ten teams submitted 1,500-word written responses to the influencer marketing case, which described a pitch that a hypothetical marketing firm, Impact, made to Widerquest, a fictitious maker of outdoor sporting equipment and apparel that sought to use influencers responsibly.

Ethics Challenge Promotional Flyer

​Although Impact’s proposal was good in many ways, it included moral concerns such as transparency about influencer compensation, respect for competitors, physical stereotypes, and product embellishment. A panel of six accomplished marketing practitioners evaluated the responses in a double-blind review process.
 
On October 1, eight teams from four different universities participated in the finale at Messiah University, where each team had five minutes to summarize its recommendations for ensuring that the influencer marketing in the case was both effective and ethical. The judges evaluated the presentations, and the combined written and oral scores were tallied to determine the top three place winners, whose school identities were then revealed:
  • 1st place – Susquehanna University
  • 2nd place – Shippensburg University
  • 3rd place – Susquehanna University
 
Those were the logistics and timeline of the competition, which were important, but what did students learn about marketing ethics that they might carry into their future careers?
 
Teams’ written and oral responses to the influencer marketing case were very insightful. Some identified implications I hadn’t considered. The ethics case and the first-place team’s written response are available on the Mindful Marketing Ethics Challenge webpage. Here are several highlights of the winning team’s analysis:
 
  • “Impact’s expectations raise serious ethical concerns that conflict with Wilderquest’s values. By requiring embellishment of features and forbidding negative feedback, the proposal undermines honesty and risks deceiving consumers.”
 
  • “Encouraging influencers to disparage competitors manipulates buyer choice and fails to treat other brands fairly.”
 
  • “Respect is also compromised by messaging that portrays consumers’ lives as ‘lacking without Wilderquest,’ exploiting insecurities rather than affirming worth.”
 
  • “Responsibility is neglected by allowing influencers to promote products they have not used, stripping audiences of genuine evaluations and reviews.”
 
  • “Encouraging technology to enhance photos or videos without disclosure risks misleading consumers. Collectively, these practices jeopardize consumer trust and contradict Wilderquest’s commitment to authenticity.”
 
First-Place Team, Susquehanna University

In these thorough and thoughtful analyses of the case’s many moral issues, team members aptly identified several specific values that marketing firm Impact appeared to neglect, e.g., fairness, honesty, respect, and responsibility. Both the teams’ case analysis and oral presentation indicated a desire to embrace rather than avoid moral responsibility.
 
These analyses were affirming, but what was participants’ overall experience in the Ethics Challenge? Did they feel that the competition, aimed at increasing moral conscience, will benefit them in the future?
 
At the finale and afterward, those involved in the Challenge provided much positive feedback. One of the students, Moriah Goiran, a member of the second-place team from Shippensburg University, gave this assessment:
 
“Overall, it was a fantastic experience! Everyone was very welcoming, which made it a generally stress-free environment. I really enjoyed everything about it but what I most appreciated was the group discussion. It was really refreshing to have an intellectually diverse and driven conversation. I enjoyed hearing everyone's thoughts and opinions and interacting with people in the business field. This was my first time at a networking event so knowing how it works and how I operate in those situations will really help me in the future with what to discuss, etc.”
 
Similarly, Ruby Calabrese, a member of the first-place Susquehanna University team, shared her reflections:
 
“The project helped me develop keen insights into what I want to do with my career in marketing but also how important it is for companies to have ethical marketing practices . . . . The Mindful Marketing project, I feel, will help me in my future career goals when constructing my path and increase my knowledge of digital marketing advertising. Thank you for such a wonderful opportunity. I’m excited to see how the competition progresses.”
 
When you think about ethics, competition may be one of the last words that comes to mind. I’ve called ethics “a team sport,” meaning, to make significant moral impact, it often takes a group of people with shared commitments to do what’s right.
 
In the Mindful Marketing Ethics Challenge, teams competed against each other for place recognition, but they all competed against forces much greater and more perilous – moral apathy and acrimony.
 
That’s the competition we all need to realize were in and resolve to approach proactively, ideally with strong teams of like-minded moral champions.
 
The inaugural Mindful Marketing Ethics Challenge was a meaningful step in the right direction of encouraging new and experienced marketers to compete against indifference and engage their field’s moral challenges with the goal of Mindful Marketing.

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Cracks in the Branding Barrel

9/1/2025

 
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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 
When you write about current ethical issues in marketing, there are sometimes trending topics you feel compelled to discuss. That’s the case with Cracker Barrel, which has stirred up two hot questions: 1) Is the company’s rebranding as unpalatable as some say, and 2) Has the “Old Country Store” cooked up something unethical?
 
To call the current conversation surrounding the half-century-old restaurant known for  downhome southern atmosphere and comfort food a “controversy” is a bit of a misnomer. True controversies are pretty evenly split between proponents and detractors. Looking online and talking with people about Cracker Barrel’ rebranding, it’s hard to find many who like the restaurant chain’s new direction.
 
A basic Google search of “Cracker Barrel rebrand” produces these kinds of harsh responses:
  • “So Arrogant” 
  • “The Worst Rebrand of All Time?
  • “How Cracker Barrel’s Rebrand Went So Wrong” 
 
Even one of  the restaurant’s co-founders, 93-year-old Tommy Lowe, has called the logo resign “pitiful.”

When I asked a couple of my classes for their thoughts, responses to the rebrand were also chilly. Most of the students are in Gen Z, not the stereotypical Cracker Barrel customer, and only a few had visited the restaurant recently, but many still voiced strong negative reactions. One student suggested the whole thing might be a PR stunt.
 
Although anything’s possible, I doubt the company would have 1) expected such backlash and 2) been willing to risk the long-term repercussions of things going sideways. That’s not a risk many companies would be willing to assume, particularly a restaurant as traditional as Cracker Barrel.
 
So, why did it decide to do such a bold rebranding? The company needed to reverse a downward slide and better position itself for the future.
 
On April 9, 2021, Cracker Barrel stock (CBRL on NASDAQ) traded at a high of $175.09. Since then, the stock has charted a rather consistent downward path.
 
About a year ago on September 6, 2024, its stock reached a low of  $37.33, a decrease of $137.76, or 78.7% of the stock’s value from the April 2021 high.
 
The precipitous loss of equity would be concern enough, but demographics also suggest a challenging future for the restaurant chain that for many years has targeted Baby Boomers and older adults. As those customers keep aging, their restaurant visits decrease and will eventually dry up. Like any organization, Cracker Barrel must ensure there are new, younger consumers to replace the ones who age out of its products/services.
 
Although this generation-to-generation transition is a perennial challenge for restaurants and other businesses, significant industry changes have made life even harder for Cracker Barrel. Fast casual chains like Panera, Chipotle, and Cava are now the eateries of choice for many consumers, including Gen Ys and Zs, who often would rather not spend the time and money on a more traditional table-service meal.
 
In addition, food tastes have changed considerably over recent years. Comfort food for millennials is more likely to be a bowl with brown rice and falafel than a plate of mashed potatoes and meat loaf. 


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These trends have already severely impacted sit-down dining restaurants such as Applebee’s, Red Lobster, and TGI Fridays. Cracker Barrel likely has lasted longer because its older and more loyal customers helped insulate the company from the trends, but that insulation is now wearing very thin.
 
To its credit, Cracker Barrel’s rebranding has involved much more than just revising its logo, or graphic icon.
 
Earlier this year, the restaurant chain began updating the interiors of its dining rooms, which has included  brighter colors and more comfortable seating. It also revamped its country stores to make the floorspace less cluttered and the merchandise more attractive. Finally, it added a variety of new menu items that both fit the old southern comfort food theme and appeal to more modern palettes, e.g., Nashville Hot and Honey Butter Fried Chicken.
 
Big market challenges usually demand bold solutions, which Cracker Barrel’s A-to-Z rebranding seems to represent. To be fair, it didn’t just slap a bandage (a more modern logo) on deeply seated problems. However, that general evaluation doesn’t mean the specific tactics it’s used are the right ones.
 
Since I’m Gen X, not one of the younger age cohorts that Cracker Barrel is most interested in for survival and future growth (Gen Y and Z), I spoke with a couple of people who are.
 
The first conversation was my son Daniel Hagenbuch, a doctoral student at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, who has a great ear for sound and eye for design. Although he hadn’t visited a Cracker Barrel store since the renovations, he’s liked what he’s seen online of the new design elements. He said the fresher paint colors and new wall décor looked more tasteful and should appeal more to younger customers, who would appreciate a more modern look. He also thought one of the restaurant’s new seasonal items, OREO Stuffed Cheesecake Pancakes looked promising. He wasn’t, however, a fan of the new logo.
 
Neither was the second Gen Z member with whom I spoke, Daniel Smith, a thoughtful senior graphic design major and marketing minor at Messiah University. On one hand, he understood reasons for replacing the old logo, such as its fine detail posing challenges for scaling to small sizes like those required for pens and business cards. However, his design sense also went against the new logo:
 
“The rebranded logo uses a modern and minimalist approach, which is not at all related to Cracker Barrel’s ‘old country store’ aesthetic. The type is surrounded by a massive, blank margin space, making it feel like it lacks character. Also, the yellow space behind the type is supposed to be a barrel on its side but  is barely recognizable, making the new logo worse than the iconic original.”
 
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His evaluation aligns with my own analysis and likely with those of other professionals. Logos shouldn’t be pictures, partly because they need to be adaptable to a variety of surfaces and imprint sizes. The first article I ever wrote made that case: “Logos Should Work on Paper, Products,” which the American Marketing Association published in Marketing News in 2001.
 
Nostalgia is often a complicated thing to market. Sometimes what people want isn’t exactly the ‘way it used to be’, rather it’s a blend of the past and present. For instance, some new turntables for vinyl records have Universal Serial Bus (USB) outputs even though USB didn’t exist during the golden age of turntables. USB was first introduced in 1996. By that time CDs had replaced cassettes, which had replaced vinyl records a decade or more before.        
 
A metaphor for people’s mixed appreciation for nostalgia might be American’s tastes for international food. Although many of us say we really like Mexican food or Chinese food, individuals from those nations sometimes point out that the food in their home countries is considerably different than the versions served in the U.S., which may be blander, have less heat, etc.
 
To survive, Cracker Barrel’s value proposition probably needs to become a fusion of past and present in order to satisfy the desires of younger generations whose lives are increasing far removed from the restaurant’s old country era. For that reason, refreshing the dining area, renovating the store, and revamping the menu are likely good things.
 
Revising its logo was also a good idea; however, the company’s execution fell short. The new logo was lacking in many ways. There likely could have been more input into its development and better communication ahead of its release.
 
Change can be hard for any of us to accept, including when it’s related to an iconic restaurant. However, it’s hard to argue that Cracker Barrel’s changes were unethical. For these reasons, the restaurant’s less-than-satisfying recipe for change tastes like Simple-Minded Marketing.

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Whether to Work in Multilevel Marketing

6/1/2025

12 Comments

 
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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 
Marketing ethics demands special care for vulnerable consumers – individuals who are at greater risk of being deceived or treated unfairly because they have less life experience, diminished senses, reduced cognitive skills, etc. While children, people with disabilities, and older adults are often considered vulnerable, one group that’s rarely included is college students; however, these young people are particularly susceptible to the practices of a specific category of employment: multi-level marketing.
 
I was glad to receive an email a few weeks ago from a student who had recently completed my business ethics course, “Morality in the Marketplace.” Rachel Sealover was an excellent participant who continually asked good questions, made insightful comments, and challenged my own thinking. However, my gladness turned to sadness as Rachel shared she had endured two very uncomfortable interviews with individuals attempting to recruit her for multilevel marketing (MLM). She then asked if I had ever written a Mindful Marketing article about MLM.
 
Having authored more than 320 ethics pieces during the last decade, I sometimes forget which issues I have/haven’t addressed. MLM seemed like one I had treated, but when a search of my master file produced no hits, I realized my recollection wasn’t from a Mindful Marketing article but from an email exchange I had with a fellow Messiah University professor more than ten years earlier.
 
In January of 2015, Professor of Philosophy Tim Schoettle contacted me after one of his former students asked to meet with him to talk about the multilevel marketer Primerica. Tim was troubled because he had seen several other MLM companies target recent college grads with unrealistic promises of clear paths to success and wealth. What’s more, just before his wife entered college, some of her mother’s Amway “upline,” higher-ups in the pyramid, told his wife that she would be more financially successful if she skipped college in favor of a career as an Amway “Independent Business Owner” (IBO).
 
Coincidentally, just a few days after I received Rachel’s email, I was seated at a table with Tim for an end-of-year “Ethics and the Common Good” retreat, as we each teach an ethics course in our university’s new general education curriculum. Without prompting or remembering our correspondence ten years earlier, Tim again brought up the topic of MLM. I was happy he did and told him that I planned to write a long overdue article on MLM and would invite his input. This, of course, is the article!
 
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, multilevel marketing refers to business models that sell directly to end consumers through independent distributors (i.e., non-employees). Moreover, the distributors are sometimes highly incentivized not just to sell products but to recruit others to do the same, as a portion of the earnings from their “downline” gets paid to those above them in the hierarchy.
 
Selling directly to end-consumers is not uncommon, for instance, thousands of automotive salespeople and real estate agents rightfully earn commissions on the cars and houses they sell to new buyers each day; however, those agents don’t typically try to recruit other agents in order to increase their earnings through passive income, which is a primary objective in much multilevel marketing.
 
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Still, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with someone who loves what they do recruiting others to do the same work. What becomes problematic, though, is when new recruits are promised income streams that are unrealistic for anyone far down in the expansive triangular organizational structures. It’s in such situations that MLM can become a pyramid scheme.
 
In pyramid schemes, a small number of initial, top-level ‘investors’ earn above average returns on their investments, which are funded by the contributions of a  larger number of newer second-tier investors. However, each subsequent level of the pyramid requires more investors to support the level above it, all while returns become increasingly difficult to deliver. Eventually, it becomes impossible for those in the lower levels of the pyramid to recoup their investments, and the pyramid collapses.
 
Some distinguish pyramid schemes from Ponzi schemes. Both share the triangular hierarchy. The main difference is that Ponzi schemes rely specifically on a continual flow of lower-level financial investors while pyramid schemes require the perpetual onboarding of new recruits who must pay significant entry fees to join the organization. In that sense MLM that prioritizes recruiting new representatives over the sale of products can rightly be called a pyramid scheme.
 
Such objective descriptions and definitions are useful; however, what’s even more meaningful is to hear from people who have experienced MLM firsthand. For that close-up perspective we turn to Rachel and Tim.
 
Given the multitude of moral issues that exist in business and marketing, we unfortunately didn’t discuss MLM in our ethics class; still, when Rachel interviewed for positions with MLM firms, her moral foundation informed her that things were not right.
 
A first red flag was the ease at which interviews were granted – She received an invitation to apply through the mail with minimal requirements: “No experience necessary, just apply using the QR code.”
 
Similarly, Tim has been alarmed by MLM firms’ aggressiveness in recruiting college students. In fact, he was so concerned by what he heard from former students, he decided to attend an Amway recruitment meeting so he could see the tactics himself. The meeting’s leader leveraged rhetoric in promising a path to wealth and independence, while avoiding any meaningful discussion of tangible business metrics like costs, customer demand, or return on investment. To Tim, the gathering felt more like “a motivational rally” than any kind of serious business seminar.
 
Rachel likewise observed a lack of financial transparency: “MLMs are usually not upfront with what employees are making for their first few paychecks, or how much you’ll make once you start.” Yet, when they do talk about results it’s “hyping up outcomes by highlighting the small percentage of people who do really well.”
 
For Tim, who maintains that “approximately 99% of participants in MLM lose money,” this practice of presenting the few best cases to prospective distributors is clearly deceptive.
 
In her interviews, Rachel also was unnerved by the firms’ “sketchy” emphasis on recruiting other distributors over selling their products:
 
“Selling the product to your target market is what every business does, but not every business is encouraging you to bring people in from your network or asking you to handover people's numbers.”
 
Tim’s many observations of MLM firms concur:
 
“The vast majority of profits in MLMs come not from selling products to customers, but from recruiting others and expanding one’s ‘downline.’ In practice, this model closely resembles a pyramid scheme.”
 
Rachel learned firsthand that MLM firms make much of their money from new recruits who they ask to pay “some sort of fee or startup cost” as a condition of employment. In that way, it doesn’t really matter how long new distributors last – the companies realize significant revenue just from what the recruits pay to sign-on.
 
Perhaps what troubled both Rachel and Tim most was seeing MLM firms make college students and recent grads their target market. As someone who knows this group better than most, Rachel acknowledged that many in the demographic are “vulnerable to get rich quick opportunities,” given their low economic means, their great desire to be hired, and their limited experience reasoning about vocational pros and cons.
 
Concerned about the lure of MLM on his students – past, present, and future – Tim laments, “The incentives to mislead are strong and baked into the system, making the bankruptcy of MLM difficult to detect, especially for those drawn in by the promise of personal success.” It’s not surprising, therefore, that he calls the business model “predatory.”
 
Are all MLM firms morally deficient? Probably not, but to synthesize Rachel’s and Tim’s reflections, ones that do one or more of the following five things offer reason for ethical pause:
  1. Incentivize the recruitment of new distributors over selling products
  2. Paint vague and/or unrealistic pictures of participant success
  3. Use rhetoric to play on prospects’ emotions, e.g., fear, excitement, unrealistic optimism
  4. Charge new enrollees significant nonrefundable startup fees
  5. Require new distributors to share contact information of individuals in their networks
 
In keeping with the fifth point, even if someone is successful in MLM, a downside is the potential strain their work can place on relationships with family members and friends who feel continual pressure to support their loved one’s sales and/or recruitment goals.
 
Regrettably, there will always be new moral issues for Mindful Marketing to analyze. It’s also regrettable that it took me over ten years to tackle multilevel marketing. However, thanks to Rachel’s and Tim’s insights, this article should provide a helpful rubric for determining when MLM firms are only looking out for themselves and, therefore, are guilty of Single-Minded Marketing.
​
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Who will be the Adult in the Room with AI?

4/1/2025

19 Comments

 
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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 
“Like a kid in a candy store” – If you’ve ever experienced unlimited access to your most desired indulgences, you may have appreciated someone stepping in to help you ‘know when to say when.’ AI quickly has become that candy store for many whose mouths are open wide to the technology’s amazing treats but who entertain few thoughts of the actions’ broader impacts. So, who will help AI users ‘know when to say when’?
 
Individuals and organizations are rapidly embracing AI to enhance productivity, from personalizing emails, to providing customer service, to optimizing delivery routes, to predicting machine maintenance, to trading stocks. In fact, several of the AI examples in the last sentence came courtesy of ChatGPT.
 
A financial sign of AI’s rocketing popularity is the report that OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent, expects its revenue to triple this year to $12.7 billion. That expectation likely stems in part from the current U.S. administration’s promised $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure in an industry partnership called Stargate.
 
It’s not surprising that AI has come so swiftly into widespread use. Criteria that predict how fast consumers adopt new products, or how quickly they diffuse into the market, suggest rapid acceptance of AI:
  • Relative advantage: Compared to the time and effort it takes to draft a report, create a complex image, etc., AI is much quicker, giving it a great economic advantage.
  • Compatibility: AI tools like ChatGPT work well with many of the productivity tools we already use, such as our smartphones’ apps, and the new technology is increasingly integrated directly into other tools.
  • Observability: AI is easy to see around us, from voice assistants (Siri, Alexa), to autocomplete functions (Messages, Word), to map apps (route optimization and traffic updates). We can often observe friends, family, and coworkers using those tools. The challenge, if any, is to realize that those commonplace applications are AI.
  • Complexity and Triability: Although AI is among the most sophisticated technologies humans have ever created, it is very easy to use, e.g., as simple as typing or speaking a command. It’s also easy to experiment with many basic AI tools, e.g., several chatbots, offer free versions, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot.
 
In sum, AI helps individuals and organizations accomplish two of life’s most prized goals: to work more effectively and efficiently. Beyond that practicality, many AI applications are exciting and fun. Some possess a jaw-dropping wow-factor that makes one wonder how the technology can do something so challenging so fast.
 
But just as too much candy can be bad for one’s teeth, too much AI is proving problematic for some of its users, as well as for individuals who barely know about it.
 
Even as many individuals and organizations dive headlong and uninhibited into AI, many others feel some, if not much, dissonance about its use. In a recent survey of knowledge workers that included 800 C-suite leaders and 800 lower-level employees, Writer/Workplace found a wide disparity in perceptions of generative AI, for instance:
  • 77% of employees using AI indicated that they were an “AI champion” or had potential to become one.
  • 71% of executives indicated there were challenges in adopting AI.
  • More than 33% of executives said AI has been “a massive disappointment.”
  • 41% of Gen Z employees were “actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy.”
  • About 67% of executives reported that adoption of AI has led to “tension and division.”
  • 42% of executives indicated that AI adoption was “tearing their company apart.”
 
Why did AI produce so much angst for these research participants? Unfortunately, the article summarizing the study’s findings didn’t identify the causes; however, I have good guesses of what some of the reasons were.
 
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In May 2024, I wrote “Questions are the Key to AI and Ethics” which identified a dozen areas of moral concern related to AI use: Ownership, Attribution, Employment, Accuracy, Deception, Transparency, Privacy, Bias, Relationships, Skills, Stewardship, and Indecency.
 
Looking back 10 months later, a long time in the life of technology, it seems the list has aged well, unfortunately. There are increasingly pressing concerns in each of the areas, such as:
  • Ownership, Attribution, Employment: Google and Open AI recently asked the White House “for permission to train AI on copyrighted content.” Over 400 leading artists, including Ron Howard and Paul McCartney, signed a letter voicing their disapproval.
  • Stewardship: AI is notoriously an “energy hog” whose data centers require far more electricity than that of their predecessors. Jesse Dodge, a research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI, shared that “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light a lightbulb for about 20 minutes.” Energy production for AI is the reason Microsoft has signed a deal to reopen the infamous nuclear power plant Three Mile Island.
  • Bias, Indecency: In his article, “Grok 3: The Case for an Unfiltered AI Model,” Shelly Palmer compares AI models that learn from sanitized datasets to xAI’s Grok 3, which has an “unhinged” mode that doesn’t restrict “harmful content—adult entertainment, hate speech, extremism.” Using the opening metaphor, Grok 3 seems like a wide-open candy shop with no adult supervision.
 
Certainly, some people have practical inhibitions about AI because they’re not sure how, when, or why to use it. Others, though, likely have moral concerns, including the ones above. I believe much of that AI dissonance stems from values embedded in every person, regardless of their worldview: principles that include decency, fairness, honesty, respect, and responsibility.
 
Granted, we don’t see these values in everyone all the time, but they’re there. Rational people know it’s indecent to show sexually explicit material in public, it’s dishonest to lie, it’s unfair to steal, etc. So when they see AI generating indecent content, creating misleading deepfakes, or appropriating others’ intellectual property, those innate values rightly spur feelings of unease.
 
So, back to the question that opened this piece: Who will keep rapidly advancing AI in moral check? Here are those influencers in reverse order of impact:
 
5) AI Itself: Over time and if trained on the right types of data, AI may become better at identifying and addressing moral issues. However, from my experience, although the technology is good at answering questions, it’s ill-equipped to ask them, especially ones involving ethical issues.
 
4) Laws: Clear-thinking senators and representatives often enact legislation that’s in the public’s best interest. However, given the time it takes to envision, propose, and pass such laws, they inevitably lag behind the behavior they aim to constrain, especially when the actions involve fast-moving tech.
 
3) Industry Associations: These organizations play useful roles in identifying opportunities and challenges that face their members. It takes time, but they often craft values statements and related documents that can help guide moral decision-making. Unfortunately, though, their edicts usually can’t be enforced the ways governments’ laws can, so compliance may be minimal.
 
2) Organizations: When they want to, business and other types of organizations can make decisions quickly. Morally grounded leaders can create policies to promote ethical behavior. The challenge is that even this guidance may not be specific enough for new or very nuanced moral dilemmas, and it’s usually impossible to speak into every action as it occurs.
 
1) Individuals: They are able to address issues as they occur and can be specially equipped for those ethical challenges. When moral issues arise, they are the ones who can and must hit pause and ask, “Yes, AI can do this, but should it?”
 
Rational principle-driven people, who embrace their innate senses of decency, fairness, honesty, respect, and responsibility, can quickly question AI's potential ethical encroachment as they see it and pump the brakes on strategies that seem likely to violate one or more of these values.
 
In the candy store that is AI, each of us needs to be the adult in the room. While we need to understand and encourage the many good things AI offers, we also need to know when to say, “That’s enough.” Ensuring that AI rightly serves humanity makes for Mindful Marketing.

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What Sales AI Can and Can't Do

3/1/2025

5 Comments

 
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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 
From writing a simply reply email to creating an $8 million Super Bowl ad, AI is impacting virtually every element of marketing. But what about the area that relies more heavily on human interaction than any other – sales? How much should personal selling embrace machine learning?
 
I received some helpful answers to this question a few weeks ago when I attended a symposium on AI in Sales, hosted by Penn State University, Harrisburg. Although I’ve worked in sales, taught a Personal Selling class for more than 20 years, and given my own presentations about AI, I hadn’t considered many of the potential uses of AI in sales that I learned at the symposium – I took several pages of notes!
 
The event’s keynote speaker was Dr. Michael Rodriguez, an accomplished sales professional who in recent years has transitioned to academia and into his current role as an assistant professor of marketing in East Carolina University’s College of Business.
 
I appreciated how Rodriguez considered the entire sales process, from Prospecting  to Follow Up & Nurture, providing examples that distinguished traditional AI use from generative AI and hybrid applications.
 
Rodriguez also offered some useful specific suggestions for how human sales professionals might lean on AI in their daily work, such as by using the technology to:
  • Aid in prospecting and effectively identifying potential new clients
  • Personalize emails, which Rodriguez said can increase response rates by 70%
  • Help prepare for sales calls so one enters such meetings better informed
  • Identify potential client objections and receive recommendations for overcoming them
  • Customize proposals to a potential client’s specific needs
 
As I listened to these and other recommendations I imagined how they may have helped me when I sold professionally, as well as how they might serve my students as they learn to sell.
 
However, as the symposium neared its close, during a time of Q & A with Rodriguez and a panel of other sales professionals, it was interesting to hear a countervailing theme emerge:
 
Despite the considerable benefits that AI offers sales, salespeople will gain the greatest competitive advantages for the foreseeable future from their unique human inputs.
 
The idea behind this thesis, which seemed to gain widespread agreement among panelists and audience members, was that over time AI will act like many new technologies, first offering advantages to early adopters but eventually entering almost everyone’s repertoire and leveling the playing field for most competitors.
 
Or, to use a poker metaphor, AI will become table stakes – something everyone must have just to get in the game. Determining who ‘wins’ will be the unique intellectual and emotional skills that people bring to the game.   
 ​
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As a flesh-and-blood being, I like the idea of people playing the pivotal role. But more objectively, it does seem like there are several selling activities that AI can’t reliably replicate, at least not now and possibly ever. Based on my experience working in sales and teaching it, these are some of those exclusively anthropic actions:
 
  • Hold a Real Conversation: AI can be very effective at helping salespeople practice selling dialogue by serving as a roleplay partner. However, as the old adage goes, “You can’t take it with you,” meaning in this case, when it comes to an actual selling situation, the salesperson must fly solo, relying on their own experience, intellect, and emotional intelligence to help move the conversation productively forward.
  • Tell a Story: In communication situations, storytelling is one of the most effective ways of gaining and retaining attention and for deducing key learning points that people will remember. Although AI is great at retrieving stories others have shared and compiling “new” ones, it can’t share original anecdotes from lived experience because, of course, it has none. That limitation is unfortunate for AI because personal stories are often the best ones.
  • Interpret Contextual Cues: Does the customer’s facial expression show that they’re happy, sad, or angry? Does their body language suggest that they’re reluctant to proceed or eager to move forward? At some point Meta AI Glasses or other wearable tech may make these inferences and share them in real-time, but at least one communication expert believes they’ll still be inferior: Megan Madsen, Chief Officer, Strategic Communications at Bravo Group in Harrisburg, PA, says, “I don’t think AI will ever replace contextual thinking on a human level.”
  • Find Common Ground: People like identifying things they have in common with others, whether they’re individuals they know, places they’ve visited, sports they follow, or restaurants they enjoy. Shared experiences and affinities help us know others better and relate to them on a more personal level – engagement that isn’t possible for virtual beings.
  • Feel and Express Emotion: How should a salesperson respond when their client mentions that their spouse just lost their job or that their daughters’ soccer team won the state championship? People are uniquely wired to feel empathy (e.g., sadness or joy) and to return emotionally appropriate responses based not just on what was shared but on the client’s emotional state and how well the salesperson knows them.  
  • Laugh: I was at a networking event recently, talking with a marketing professional, when a well-intentioned college student abruptly broke into our conversation held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Bob, a junior marketing major at State; what do you do?” I quickly grasped his hand and as I shook it replied, “Not much.” We all laughed. I’m not sure what led me to say that – perhaps it was understanding the context and knowing that the line, which I probably heard someone else say years ago, would offset the awkwardness. Anyway, it seemed like the right humor at that moment, with no assist from AI.
  • Socialize: A very small percentage of all sales are made on golf courses or in stadium club boxes, but it is common for salespeople to get to know customers and discuss business over a meal, in order to save time but more importantly to build relationships. Good things often happen when people break bread together.
  • Identify Moral Concerns: From my experience, AI is not on the lookout for possible ethical infractions, and as several of the preceding bullets have suggested, it usually can’t be present to help make real-time choices. So, if a purchasing agent asks a salesperson to increase their proposal by $500 so the purchasing agent can pocket the excess, what should the salesperson do? Their human knowledge should alert them that they’re being asked to pay a bribe and prompt them to reject the appeal outright.
 
AI applications are redefining the ways marketing is done. Salespeople should use those technological tools to work more efficiently and effectively while also remember that it’s their uniquely human aptitudes that ultimately set them apart. Technological proficiency paired with a genuine personal touch is the best approach for Mindful Marketing.
​
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