Black Hat Marketing vs. White Hat Marketing

Few quick pills of philosophy

According to a popular tradition, Saint Thomas used to begin his lessons at the renowned university of Paris, La Sorbonne, placing an apple on his desk and telling his pupils: “This is an apple, and whoever disagrees with this, is free to leave my classroom now”. What did he mean by this? Easy said: he wanted to stress the fact that, no matter our beliefs, reality trumps all, and therefore his pupils had not to fall in love with their ideas, but instead they had to keep an open mind when checking the consequences of the hypotheses they had formulated.

Sounds familiar? Well, if it does it’s because this is the essence of the scientific method: formulate hypotheses, make experiments accordingly, check results, and then (and only then), infer what’s right and what’s wrong. If, while checking results, the hypothesis proves incorrect, then change it.

It might seem obvious, but nowadays we are accustomed to a more ideological approach.

Another anecdote might explain why: according to another legend, the renowned philosopher Hegel once said: “If facts contradict the theory, then the worse for the facts!”. Perhaps it’s not by chance that Hegel is considered one of the fathers (if not the most important) of 20th-century most horrific ideologies, including Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.

An ideological approach is always bad because it causes one to miss the lesson of reality.

This applies also to communication and marketing and the two above attitudes (that attributed to Saint Thomas as opposed to that attributed to Hegel) exemplify very well what I mean by white hat and black hat marketing.

Marketing & Communication

If it’s true that marketing is a form of communication, then the basic rules of communication should apply to it as well. I am sure every marketer is familiar at least with Jakobson’s communication model, as it is usually taught in high school also.

According to the Russian-American scholar Roman Jakobson, there are at least three basic elements in any communication: a sender, a message, and a receiver. To these, one should also add context, channel (which stands for the medium through which the message is delivered), and code (which stands for the language in which the message is delivered). When you focus on a particular element (for instance: the message), you inevitably adopt a corresponding particular register.

The question now is: which element should a marketer focus on, if he wants to deliver his message properly?

In my opinion, the elements, in order of significance, should be:

1.??????receiver

2.??????message

3.??????channel

To be effective, every marketing campaign should revere the end user as the most important being on the face of the earth and should communicate this urgency along with the message.

As for the message, it should be crystal clear and convey some sort of clearly perceivable benefit for the end user, while the language should adequate to the channel through which the message is delivered (which oftentimes also implies reaching a very specific audience).

Now, let’s consider for a moment the definition of marketing as put forward by the American Marketing Association, as illustrated in my last article: “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders”.

The end of the definition “in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders” seems to imply that the value we are talking about here is not that of the receiver/customer, but rather that of the company which is advertising its product.

While it’s clear that the optimum would in any case be reached when the best interest of the customer and that of the company coincide, according to AMA’s definition this would only be the best possible outcome. Should the two interests not overlap, then the marketer should in any case pursue the corporate interest.

Is this an ideological approach? Well, yes, unless you add that the marketer should always strive to match the company's best interests with those of the end customer, which is exactly what marketing should do. Sadly, AMA’s definition does not say so.

Let’s take a step back. Some could argue that, as the marketer works for the company, then it is only fair that he puts his employer's interests before those of his client. This seems deceptively right, isn’t it?

However, this reasoning has a big flaw, because the company (all of it, including the marketer) has its raison d'etre in working for the end customer.

Let’s put it this way: if the product a company sells is of no use to anyone, then that product should not be on the market, and, sooner or later, the market itself will see to that end.

This simple fact is what caused great companies of the past to fail and be thrown out of entire markets, if not altogether obliterated. I am sure everybody can make at least one example of this sad kind of epilogue.

To stay and prosper in a very competitive and overcrowded scenario a company has to solve a real problem. The more specific the problem is, and the quicker and more direct the solution, the better it is.

If that’s not the case, then it’s up to the Marketing to let the word spread, inside the company, that something needs to be changed.

Black Hat Marketing & White Hat Marketing

Even though the price for not changing is extremely high, and so is the price associated with it, resistance to the change will typically be the first answer by the company.

After all, changing our ways is one of the most excruciating activities one can imagine and that applies also to companies.

When a company decides to change the end customer, instead of its product, it usually relies on what we defined previously as black hat marketing.

Given the above, the following points try to sum up briefly the gist of what black hat marketing is and how it operates:

Aim: changing the perception of the customer

Beneficiary: the company (but only in a very short-term perspective)

Means to the end: price cuts (product devaluation), unfulfillable promises, distraction techniques, subconscious manipulation, neuroscience and persuasion techniques, NLP, conversational hypnosis, subliminal messages, sexualization of the product…

On the opposite end of the spectrum, instead, lies white hat marketing, which can be briefly summarized in the following points:

Aim: informing the potential customer about the benefits of a product

Beneficiary: the customer (and the company, accordingly)

Means to the end: try & buy, demonstrations of product qualities, focusing the attention of the potential customer on the product, requesting conscious feedback, clear and concise communication, creative usage of advertising, loyalty strategies and permission marketing, supraliminal messages, objectification of the product…

It is more than clear that the two approaches are quite opposite to one another. It is also clear that the black hat marketing style is starting to piss off people more and more, thus getting no results, if not even getting quite the opposite of what was the initial objective.

The reason for this is, once again, quite simple: people are not stupid. As the adage goes: "you can cheat someone every time, you can cheat many people once, but you can never cheat everyone forever".

That is also why marketers lately started to talk about a gentle marketing revolution (credits be to Sarah Santacroce for coming out first with this idea).

The old sneaky approach does not seem to work anymore, or, at least, less and less. Marketers can think they are smarter than the market, but if that’s what really believe, they better think again.

We’ll see how to approach white hat marketing practically in a further in-depth analysis.

As usual, all your feedback on this topic is more than welcome.