Marketers need to be careful and act with morals and principles to avoid applying marketing techniques that are considered unethical.
By The Encyclopedia Britannica, persuasion is the process by which a person’s attitudes or behavior are, without duress, influenced by communications with other people. Not all type of communication is intended to be persuasive; some are to inform, educate or entertain. The concept of manipulation is similar to persuasion, but the outcome is different. Usually, the intention of persuasion is more noble and positive, while manipulation has a negative connotation.
You can influence or persuade a person to be a better person; for example, I can convince a person who is obese to see a doctor or nutritionist. As a result, the doctor may recommend a diet and some physical exercise under supervision. This person can improve his health by losing weight and lowering his risks of heart disease, diabetes, etc. The outcome is positive; the person will improve his health and look incredible and attractive. Following this example, you can influence a person or manipulate a person to enroll in a diet to make money by selling them some services like nutritional supplements, hiring a personal trainer, and everything without medical advice, by saying something like, you are young, you don’t need a doctor, you can start losing weight immediately. The outcome can be harmful because the person may not follow the diet or the personal trainer. After all, with health issues, the person may not lose weight, spend money, and harm himself.
Persuasive advertising aims to create liking, preference, conviction, and purchase of a product or service.
Talking about marketing, the book Marketing Management by Kotler and Keller defines persuasive advertising as follows: “Persuasive advertising aims to create liking, preference, conviction, and purchase of a product or service”.
Typically, a persuasive advertising campaign uses some techniques like comparative advertising. Maybe you remember the campaign “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC,” where individuals talked about Mac’s benefits and weaknesses. Another example is when a salesperson is trying to sell you a water filter for the whole house, they go to your house and make a water test showing you the deficiencies or lower water quality in your home, also offer your financial plan so you can pay the filter by more down monthly payment.
They are a thing line between persuasion and manipulation
They are a thin line between persuasion and manipulation. Marketers need to be careful and act with morals and principles to avoid applying marketing techniques that are considered unethical and can harm first people. The product, the brand, and of course, can generate losses for the company and even send some people to jail.
One well-known case of unethical or manipulative advertising occurred on a global scale with the “diesel dupe” this happened in 2015 when Volkswagen installed emissions software on more than half a million diesel cars in the USA (and around 10.5 million more worldwide). This software allows VW cars to sense the unique parameters of an emissions drive cycle by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). When EPA tests the vehicles, everything is fully compliant, but a consumer drives the car, the computer switches to a “separate mode,” significantly changing the fuel pressure, injection timing, exhaust-gas recirculation, etc. While, according to Card & Drive magazine, this mode delivers higher mileage and power, it also permits heavier nitrogen-oxide emissions (NOx), a smog pollutant linked to lung cancer.
Of course, consumers were manipulated to buy these cars because even though they are diesel, they have low pollution emissions, high efficiency, and power. This caused Volkswagen to around a $14.7 billion settlement. VW had to buy back around 340,000 diesel vehicles of VW, Porsche, and Audi brands, and each user received between $12K and $44K in compensation. The owners who decided not to sell it to VW received between $5K and $10K in payment for the diminished resale value. Besides this, the US Department of Justice announced $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties and arrested six VW executives for their alleged connection with this scandal.
This is not the first time a scandal like this has shaken the automaker industry; General Motors and Toyota were also involved in scandals.
As you can see, manipulation in marketing can have severe consequences for people, brands, products, etc. But big brands can learn from mistakes and take action; in the case of VW, there were people in jail in the USA and Germany, but the brand remains the second largest car manufacturer in the world; the first one is Toyota, according to Bloomberg.com Toyota already leads VW by over 1 million vehicles in global car sales.
In conclusion, marketers should use their communications techniques with honesty and integrity. You can persuade consumers to buy your products by showing the real product’s characteristics and the benefits of the product vs. the weakness of competitor’s products, but what you need to avoid is manipulating and forcing a consumer to buy a product that doesn’t have certain characteristics or hiding defects or not informing specific details that can affect the consumer or even harm him, this is misleading. So again, be honest and fair with your consumers and competitors. Remember, in the Internet era, information is available to everybody, and nothing can be hidden.
