Morality & Marketing

Marketing is about selling. But is it about selling at any cost? The writer of the piece linked below is a marketing insider; it would be interesting to know whether he things there is something about marketing that makes that aspect of business particularly susceptible to bad behaviour, or whether behaviour in marketing is any worse than it is in sales, purchasing, finance, and so on. >>>

LINK: How a crisis of morality is slowly killing marketing (by Bruce Philp for Canadian Business)

…So, maybe pitches are never showcases of ad biz rectitude. But neither has the recent moral decline stopped there. It has actually becoming frighteningly normal. On the agency side, for example, media kickbacks have become so controversial—and common—that four of the largest agencies have had their stocks downgraded over the potential cost of stopping the practice. Click fraud remains such a big problem that organizations have been formed to fight it as if it were a disease. Major brands like Kraft and Kellogg so distrust the viewability numbers they get from online video publishers that they’re boycotting them until they see independently verified data. Fudging time sheets seems almost quaint. “We audit everything now,” the CEO of a major consumer packaged goods brand glumly told me recently. “Everything.”….

What do you think?

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