No-Harm Marketing Ethics: How to Attract Customers and Sell So You Still Like Yourself in the Morning

By Marcia Yudkin

How to Market With Respect for Others, the Planet and Yourself

Is marketing evil? Does marketing necessarily produce an over-consuming society where people are brutish and nasty to one another?

No. Find out how you can attract clients and customers without harming others, the planet or your own self-respect.

This concise ebook by veteran marketer Marcia Yudkin offers 12 guidelines for ethical marketing, abundant examples of common practices to avoid, and a checklist of eight questions to help you determine the moral course of action.

Should you aim for as many buyers as you can, no matter what?

Why is responsible packaging important?

What should you do with respect to buyer's remorse?

Fear, greed and shame sell! Yes, but...

Should we view marketing as "a numbers game"?

Is it still possible (and wise) to respect customer privacy?

Do you know the many faces of deception in marketing?

How can we respect shoppers' diversity?

What's the relationship between authentic marketing and ethics?

No-Harm Marketing Ethics addresses the above issues with challenging real-life examples and commentary. Use the list of questions it ends with to guide ethical decision making in a world with many questionable shades of gray.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcia Yudkin
• Release date: Sep 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005407582

Marcia Yudkin

Creative marketing expert Marcia Yudkin has an unparalleled ability to find the right words for a message, an unusual angle to get folks to pay attention, and the promotional strategy that pays off handsomely for her clients.Her 16 books include 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover, Meatier Marketing Copy and Freelance Writing for Magazines & Newspapers, a Book of the Month Club selection.Marcia’s articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, TWA Ambassador, USAir Magazine and Business 2.0. For eight years running, she served as an official site reviewer for the Webby Awards and has helped judge the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards.She has been featured in Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Home Office Computing, Working Woman, Women in Business, dozens of newspapers throughout the world and four times in the Sunday Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.Her clients range from grizzled entrepreneurs to nervous newly self-employed professionals, from software publishers and ecommerce startups to media companies, associations and independent educational programs.Marcia Yudkin holds three Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in the humanities.

Book preview

No-Harm Marketing Ethics

How to Attract Customers and Sell So You Still Like Yourself in the Morning

by Marcia Yudkin

Author, 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 16 other books

www.yudkin.com

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012, 2020 Marcia Yudkin.

All rights reserved.

Contents

Introduction

Top No-Harm Marketing Principles

What About Pricing?

Now It’s Your Turn

About the Author

Introduction

Is marketing evil? Some commentators lay the blame for the excesses of our consumer society at the doorstep of marketers. The frenzy of shop till you drop is bad for the environment, they charge. It also rots the soul.

Every new acquisition generates disappointment, restlessness and another round of conspicuous (hence pointless) consumption, writes Dennis Rohayton in the book Philosophy History Sophistry. This, for many critics, is the dark side of consumer marketing. One could say the same even when the goods being purchased are intangibles, such as the digital reports, memberships and coaching programs that Internet marketing seminar attendees rush to buy in the back of the room after being worked up into a froth.

According to Marty Nemko in a fiercely combative essay on the Psychology Today website, when marketing convinces you to buy things you don’t need or to buy luxury-level items that perform no better than no-name brands, you become worse off financially, with a less secure future. Marketers therefore are for the most part hurting those they market to. And to the extent that it impedes rational decision making, marketing makes the world worse.

After giving the matter considerable thought, however, I decided that marketing is not intrinsically evil. It simply requires conscience. You can use marketing to promote products and services that add to the comfort, functionality, sustainability, happiness and prosperity of the world around you. If your livelihood requires marketing, you can do it well without exploiting, cheating, deceiving or harming customers.

During my nearly 40 years in business, I’ve observed and reflected on a good many marketing practices or rationales that make me shudder. So in this report I’ve identified guidelines you might consider adopting if you feel it’s vital to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning feeling content about how you bring in customers. I do not usually name the guilty here, but rest assured that everything objectionable that I mention I have actually seen or heard.

Top No-Harm Marketing Principles

1. Always aim at the best possible match between what you're selling and who