As marketers, we naturally want to know as much as we possibly can about current and potential customers. They are the center of our worlds—what they want, why they want it, when they need it—because we'd literally be lost without them. We delve into their minds and look closely at where they shop, how much they earn, where they live, how many kids they have, what they watch on television or read, where they go on the Internet, how they vote, and on and on. Understandably, knowing companies have increasingly intimate knowledge about them makes people a little uneasy. Incidents such as when Eli Lilly accidentally revealed the email addresses of some 600 patients during a routine mailing certainly don't help convince consumers that we can be trusted.

Whether we realize it or not, each marketing decision we make may lead to an ethical dilemma. For instance, a hospital emergency room offering free donuts to ambulance drivers may sound harmless enough; almost a courtesy really. But what if a driver makes a decision to bring a critically injured patient to the one with the donuts when another is closer? Patient care is jeopardized as a result of what could be called an incentive.

Another example of ethical questions raised by a marketing campaign is Sony-Ericsson Mobile Communications' guerilla effort in the U.S. to promote its new combination mobile phone-digital camera. In August, Sony-Ericsson deployed actors and actresses to major cities to pose either as tourists or barflies, engage consumers in conversation and, through a variety of means, get them to try out the phone-camera. Sounds innocent enough, but here's the ethical rub: Sony-Ericsson operatives do not disclose who they are working for unless they are asked directly—they don't identify themselves with logo-adorned uniforms or introduce themselves by saying, "Hi, I'm from Sony-Ericsson." In other words, consumers are unwittingly convinced—some might say tricked—into sampling a product.

This campaign has inspired many an angry editorial and the ire of Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert organization "It's deceptive," said Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director, "People will be fooled into thinking this is honest buzz." Sony-Ericsson counters that it's all in good fun and an effort to get people talking in a competitive environment where creating buzz about new mobile gadgets is exceedingly difficult.

So who's right? As with ethical discussions of other business, medical, and life issues, there isn't always a clear black and white answer. In the case of Sony-Ericsson, while we don't know that the company is necessarily hurting anyone, at the same time engineering a social interaction—when only the company knows the pretext—to get consumers to try a product doesn't seem exactly honest. And that's our concern.

Post-Enron, WorldCom, et al, marketers will find their ethics under as much scrutiny as their financial and management counterparts. With the perception of our profession already in the tubes, we have an even greater obligation to think through the possible ethical implications of decisions. Otherwise, the more consumers think of "marketing ethics" as an oxymoron, the less responsive to our million dollar marketing efforts they will be, and the less profits our companies will earn.

*Source: Procter & Gamble

Price wars were a well-known entity in the airline business, but they used to come in short bursts. In came the discount airlines and hormones surged as the big six saw the threats to their territories. Down came prices permanently. Of course, discounters offered other benefits in addition to a low price. Southwest, for example, offered easy access to travel to and from smaller cities and had a better record of faster and on-time service. But the airlines, flush with capacity thanks to a boom in the 80s and continued expansion in the 90s, brought it all down to price. The problem was that while discounters like Southwest didn't offer things like assigned seats, the big six did. Too late they realized three scoops of ice cream for a quarter is two too many and losses mounted, exacerbated by September 11 and the recession.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Many government experts and industry analysts have said the only things that can save the big six are the spread of labor problems to the discount carriers and consolidation to bring capacity more in line with demand. Though there's a good chance that, as they expand, discounters such as Southwest and Spirit will see increasing labor costs, this isn't exactly something on which to base a recovery plan or business strategy. People are traveling on airlines less, so some capacity reductions are necessary, at least for the moment. But, just as in any industry, while consolidation can eliminate some costs, ultimately airlines will need to generate more sales in order to survive. But all hope is not lost.

While airlines may have reset consumers' willingness to pay several notches lower, everyone has different ceilings. This may sound obvious, but the closest airlines have come to actually recognizing this is to differentiate between business and leisure travelers. It's more than that. It's looking at which business travelers will pay more and why. "Right now, you just don't see the difference between a full-fare and discount tickets," the travel manager for consulting giant Booz-Allen told the New York Times recently. "If you were able to say, 'I paid three times the discount fare because I want an aisle seat and frequent flier miles,' then maybe it might make sense." Eureka!

Same goes for leisure travelers. If they want to survive airlines must wake up to the fact that buyers differ from each other in ways aside from why they are traveling.

Back to top.

Is it just us, or does it seem like every week an ad appears somewhere completely unexpected? We're talking about the panels in bathroom stalls, stickers on fruit, displays in subway tunnels—not just on the trains or in the stations any more—and now even on baby carriages.

Yes, baby carriages are supposedly becoming a hot out-of-home property. Denmark's Nytmedie began offering Danish parents a baby carriage if they agreed to push it around with a corporate sponsor's logo on it. Because Denmark only has about 60,000 births a year, Nytmedia needs bigger markets, and is looking at the U.S. and other European countries for expansion. "Traditional forms of outdoor advertising have lost much of their impact," explains one of Nytmedie's founders. "This is new. And it has high visibility."

We have no doubt that, for companies that offer baby care products or services, toys, maybe even financial services, buggy space will be instantly attractive. Whether it offers a good return on investment we can't say, but we supposed that, at least in the beginning, it'll be cheaper and less cluttered than other similarly targeted options. We emphasize "in the beginning."

But like any other communications vehicles—remember banner ads?—
the novelty of a marketing tool will wear off as more and more companies use it and the medium fills up with competing messages. Response rates decline as consumers learn to tune out the noise. As marketing gurus Al Reis and Jack Trout wrote in their ground-breaking book Positioning, "The medium may not be the message, but it does seriously affect the message. Instead of a transmission system, the medium acts like a filter. Only a tiny fraction of the original material ends up in the mind of the receiver."

It seems that the more ad performance declines, the more companies search for the next breakthrough medium. But ad performance is based on the message a company is sending as much as the medium it is sending it through. Eventually companies have to deal with improving the message instead of just tweaking the medium. No matter how creative is an idea for where to place an ad, the medium alone isn't going to get people to buy a brand.

For more insightful marketing discoveries, visit http://www.copernicusmarketing.com/discover/index.htm

Have a hot discovery for our next release? Contact us at info@copernicusmarketing.com

Back to top.

While we don't agree that PR will—or should, for that matter—replace advertising out of hand, we appreciate the sentiment that scrutinizes the performance of advertising. The ad campaigns included in the book as examples of the ineffectual make a compelling case that something needs to be done to improve advertising.

Back to top.

AT&T's M-life series of ads is a perfect example from earlier in 2002. For several weeks in January, AT&T ran spots featuring people talking about how they were ready for an "M-life." Of course, there was no indication AT&T was in anyway affiliated with getting an M-life or what one was. It could have been anything. On a grand scale, AT&T announced it could make an M-life possible in an obscure spot on the Super Bowl featuring the navels of different people. M-life is having cordless phone communication, and the belly buttons symbolized that the cord had been cut. Or so we surmised.

But we've seen several spots this summer that rival AT&T's M-Life and next month we'll report our top picks for mystery ads in the U.S. of summer 2002 and will take your suggestions as well. We can't imagine mystery ads are indigenous to America, so while we're at it, please send your nominations for mystery ad from other countries. Click here to send us your pick.

Back to top.