Do Marketers Have A Responsibility to Tell the Truth?

Yuval Noah Harari argues in his fantastic book, Sapiens, that human societies only exist because of collective myths. He doesn’t use the term ‘myth’ to mean something untrue, but rather something that is not objectively true. That the sun rises everyday is objectively true but the notion in The Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” is subjective (and, indeed, is objectively false from a biological perspective).?

Geographical boundaries that define countries are myths. Religions are myths. Rules, regulations, and forms of government are myths. Money is a myth, corporations are a myth. These myths, however, are powerful glue that enable humans to build civilizations unparalleled in the animal world:

Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city, or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights, and money paid out in fees.?

Seth Godin wrote a book called All Marketers Are Liars, which he eventually retitled All Marketers Are Storytellers. His argument was similar to Harari’s - people want to believe in myths and your job as a marketer is to create myths that consumers can believe in. In a blog post about the book, Godin notes:

You believe things that aren’t true.

Let me say that a different way: many things that are true are true because you believe them.

[ . . .]

We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.?

[. . .]

If you think that (more expensive) wine is better, then it is. If you think your new boss is going to be more effective, then she will be. If you love the way a car handles, then you’re going to enjoy driving it.

Godin changed the name from “Liars” to “Storytellers” because he believed we were seeing a paradigm shift in marketing. He saw modern consumers as being smarter and less forgiving than consumers at the dawn of the modern marketing era. A company that outright lied to consumers today would suffer in the marketplace:

The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off any more. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.

So, it’s tempting to put up a demagogue for Vice President, but it doesn’t take long for the reality to catch up with the story. It’s tempting to spin a tall tale about a piece of technology or a customer service policy, but once we see it in the wild, we talk about it and you whither away.

So while Harari and Godin both agree on the power of myths, Harari believes that some myths win out over others in a Darwinistic sense - he makes no judgement as to the evidence to support the myth - whereas Godin believes that society will repel myths that can be proven false.

Harari’s relativistic perspective on myths is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, where the authoritarian government tortures a rebellious citizen relentlessly until he is so submissive that he is willing to believe the torturer’s assertion that two plus two equals five. As the book’s narrator notes: “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

Post-Truth Marketing

Today, we are living in a “post-truth world.” As Wikipedia describes it: “Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth" and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alternative facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth".?

Harari, the author of Sapiens, makes no bones about his perspective on post-truth; specifically, he argues that it is consistent with human history’s reliance on myths:?

If this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era? The internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.?

And Harari specifically disagree with Godin’s “lying fails” argument when it comes to marketing:

Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth. What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola? Do you think about healthy young people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic — rather, it will increase your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health, and sports — and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.

I don’t entirely agree with this perspective. If an ad shows consumers pictures of giant, juicy hamburgers topped with the freshest vegetables and the actual experience is a small and sad hamburger with a few strands of wilted lettuce, consumers will quickly call you out (what else is Twitter for?). Here’s one of a million such memes that are floating around the Web:

And yet, I’m confident that Burger King makes a lot more money by showing an unrealistically beautiful hamburger (the myth) in their ad than one that shows the reality. So, sure, some people will complain, but creating the fiction in the mind of consumers that you might someday get that burger in the ad is enough to outweigh the Internet memes and drive people into the stores. In aggregate, lying in marketing works!

But we have yet to ask an important question: just because you can do something, does that mean that you should do it? This is the essence of ethics - making decisions that factor in the outcome for society, rather than your own personal benefit.

The Standards - Or Lack Thereof - That Govern Marketers

There are many professions who educate their practitioners on ethics, and even ban those who violate the industry’s ethical standards.?

If you become a doctor, you are taught the Hippocratic Oath, most famously expressed as “first, do no harm.” This oath has also been codified into law in the US, where a doctor who does not maintain high standards of professionalism can have his or her medical license revoked. Imagine a doctor who is being paid by a pharmaceutical company to be a “consultant” to the company. The doctor has seen evidence that the Company’s drug causes serious side effects for many patients, but he nonetheless prescribes it to every patient that comes in his office and does frequent media interviews in which he touts the drug as a completely safe miracle cure.

Eventually, when his fraud is revealed, he will face the wrath of the medical licensing board, civil liability, and possibly criminal conviction.

Lawyers are subject to the Rules of Professional Responsibility - a codified list of ethical standards. Failure to follow these rules can result in disbarment. A lawyer who files a frivolous lawsuit, knowingly fails to disclose evidence to the opposing side, or lies to the court on behalf of his client will be punished (again, potentially criminally) for his lies.

Marketers are not held to any such standards. There is no professional oversight board that can revoke a marketer’s right to practice marketing. Unlike doctors and lawyers, no degree is needed to become a marketer. And even if you do get a degree, to my knowledge, there is no requirement that colleges offering marketing majors mandate a class on marketing ethics.

And yet, marketers are at the front lines of the creation of myths, a very important shaper of society. As Harari notes, the Coca Cola myth can have deadly consequences for Americans who believe it. And this is just one of thousands of myths that marketers have created that result in questionable outcomes.?

Consider, for example, that the tobacco industry used sexualized cartoon characters to encourage youth smoking.?

Or that lottery ads target lower income citizens - the people who can least afford the bad odds of lotteries.?

To fill the gaping void left by a lack of training or enforcement in the marketing industry, Americans are theoretically protected against deceptive advertising by a very loose patchwork of regulation and private enforcement.

On the regulatory side, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does prosecute companies for deceptive marketing. They even have a website that outlines guidelines for “Truth in Advertising.” But again, few marketers are aware of these standards and, like most government agencies, the FTC is way too understaffed to effectively police the marketing industry.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) has ethical standards its members must adhere to. These standards include a prohibition against “False or misleading statement’s [sic] or exaggerations, visual or verbal” and “Claims insufficiently supported or that distort the true meaning or practicable application of statements made by professional or scientific authority.” The consequence for gross violations of these standards is revocation of a company’s membership in the AAAA (though I suspect that less than 1% of ad agencies are actually members of the AAAA to begin with).

Platforms like Google and Facebook have attempted to fill the void through their own policing. Google, for example, has a massive list of products and marketing practices that they don’t allow on their site. Among Google’s prohibited products:

• Addiction treatment centers
• Gene therapy kits
• Credit repair
• Bail bonds
• Third party computer support
• Call forwarding
• Passport renewal
• Weapons
• Fireworks

I don’t think Google is making a judgment on whether all of these products are evil, per se; rather, they are judging the marketing community: left unfettered, marketers cannot be trusted to create responsible myths, so for certain categories, we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and ban the category entirely.

What Sort of Myths Will You Create?

As a marketer, your job is to sell myths. Some of these myths are pretty innocuous (buy your wife flowers on Valentine’s Day! Use an electric toothbrush twice a day!). But I suspect that every marketer has created myths that make them uncomfortable.?

In my 20 years of marketing, I’ve regrettably promoted predatory payday loans, questionable nutriceuticals, “negative billing” subscriptions, and spyware.

With some of these products, I failed to ask pointed questions about what exactly I was marketing. With others, I absolved myself of responsibility by concluding that the consumer was free to make bad decisions if they wanted to.

Now more than ever it is clear that marketing can have powerful consequences.

In the last year, we have seen how destructive post-truth myths can be. There are millions of people around the world who have decided to NOT get a free vaccine that will save their lives, protect their vulnerable neighbors, and reduce the psychological and economic toll of the pandemic on the world. Many of these people have been swayed to act this way by talented marketers (and marketing-savvy politicians) who are actively and effectively propagating false myths.?

Will these liars (er, storytellers?) be punished if their myths cause unnecessary death and illness? I doubt it. If anything, many of these myth-makers will profit from their deception.

Marketers lack regulatory oversight and get limited to no training in ethics. And yet we spend our days creating myths designed to change mass behavior. We are rewarded and promoted when the myth is successful - usually measured entirely by financial metrics.

Individual marketers are left to depend on their moral compass to make the right decisions. You can choose to be an active peddler of misleading or false myths or you can promote the truth.?

The easiest path is to just do as you are told. You’ll make a good income, probably get promoted, and you won’t have to wrestle with uneasy ethical questions on a daily basis.

Yet, as John Stuart Mill noted: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

The stakes are higher than they ever have been. What sorts of myths will you choose to create?