Nader Sammouri 

Businesses may be willing to do almost anything to sell and expand their profits including using marketing and advertising methods that are morally questionable. 

“There’s good marketing and there’s bad marketing. The challenge is telling which is which. We can think of marketers as occupying a unique role in society. They are, among other things, communicators of product and service value. We expect them to impart accommodating information that imposes a healthy choice for the consumer, one that aligns with their goals. However, sometimes they withhold important information or mislead. Marketers should try to phrase things carefully, do their research about the products and services they market, and rely only on the most trustworthy sources they can find,” said Ahmed Juhany, a strategist-at-large at Concept Design, a creative consultancy in Tokyo, Japan.

Thanks to the transparency of information caused by the internet, there is less information disparity between the buyer and the seller, and the seller can no longer take advantage of data imbalance like they used to do before the internet. The consumer is more knowledgeable and can fight back with online reviews and research.

Marketing can exploit, “taking advantage of consumer’s lack of information to get them to hand in their money. This is what ‘Big Tobacco’ did for years, and led to an epidemic of tobacco addictions and cancerous diseases. But sometimes marketing is unintentionally bad. The problem that marketers face today is that there aren’t any incentives or systems in place to ensure that they exercise due diligence,” Juhany said.

False advertising can be filled with exaggerated praise that is backed up with superlatives, unscientific claims, mislabeling, and hidden fees.

“Get-rich-quick schemes are common manipulation techniques spread online that often target a young demographic. You’ll find a lot of YouTube and blog-based businesses pushing out ‘secret formulas’ for people to gain muscles, become more sociable, artistic, or even become capable marketers,” Juhany said.

He explained how their approach works, sharing how “it’s pretty straightforward: first, they start by offering free advice that works and has some value in it. If they are selling marketing itself, they would be talking about writing clearly, crafting a customer persona, basic SEO, etc. With that they hope to establish trust. Once potential customers start to trust, they are more prone to purchase courses or books that supposedly give them the ‘secret formula.’ People end up spending money thinking they’ll finally have the tools to achieve some wonderful goal, only for them to be handed a faulty formula that just doesn’t work,” Juhany said.

When it comes to marketing in different regions and countries, marketers are doing the same thing: figuring out what consumers want and what channels they can use to market through the right channels.

“I don’t think you can draw broad differences between consumer demands in MENA and Japan without getting specific about what country from MENA you’re interested in and what market you’re in. But there are some identifiable patterns of what channels people use. In my experience, the social media channels that are most effective in MENA are not the same as those that are most effective in Japan. For instance, in my opinion blogs work in Japan more than MENA, mostly because there’s a large international audience. I’ve often been told that Japanese consumer culture is much more risk-averse, and so marketing materials should put up as much information as possible. It’s likely a historical contingency: an original model of advertising was introduced at some point before being imitated and reaffirmed across generations through the use of different technologies,” Juhany said.

Although marketing is inevitable, it can be misguided and deceptive. People need to understand that not all products are meant to serve them, even if they’re are marketed in such a way.