For decades, marketers have been encouraged to use spurious tactics to get people to buy more stuff. Once a brand starts focusing on guilt, anxiety, or fear to sell its products, the potential impact on consumers – particularly those already in fragile mental states – simply isn’t worth it. Such tactics turn us from marketers into exploiters.

Brands and marketers shouldn’t have to trick people into buying stuff. You can positively do this by talking about the good things and the positive things you bring to the market. Marketing is about getting your message out to the market and about shifting products. Marketers should encourage people to move away from cynical fear tactics and move towards positive tactics.

How Does Your Marketing Measure up For Mental health?

1. Don’t make false claims

2. Don’t exaggerate the facts or distort the truth

3. Don’t promote messages that exploit your customers’ emotions

4. Don’t use fear tactics

5. Don’t conceal important information.

6. Don’t bad-mouth your rivals

7. Don’t copy competitors

8. Don’t be racist, sexist, ageist, or fall foul of any other ‘ist’

9. Don’t exploit children.

10. Don’t spam your customers

Return on Ethics

Most marketers consider marketing ethically to be important to them, but many have concerns about unethical marketing practices in the industry – and even within their organization.

Did you know?

• 26% of marketers have seen negative results from using unethical marketing tactics

• 18% of marketers agree that the company they work for is not as ethical as they would like it to be in its marketing practices

• 22% of marketers have felt ashamed to be a marketer because of unethical marketing practices

• 25% have felt pressured to use unethical marketing tactics at work

• 83% say they would not work for a company that they did not consider to be ethical in its marketing

• 88% of marketers say marketing ethically is important to them

The Bottom Line

Are you planning to build a better marketing industry and use the awesome power of marketing for good? Seek the help of experts! They have built a very successful and rapidly growing marketing company without targeting or exploiting consumers’ negative emotions at all. They put the emotional needs of the public at large first, in every ad, every email, and every marketing campaign.

They have a moral responsibility to not intentionally exploit people using negative emotions. Their potential to manipulate and exploit negative human emotions may not be widely understood yet, but it is very real.

Linking with Context

A. What Are Emotions and Why Do They Matter? < https://imotions.com/blog/emotions-matter/ >.

B. Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine < https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/652020/ >.

C. Social and Emotional Skills – Well-being, connectedness, and success < https://www.oecd.org/education/school/UPDATED%20Social%20and%20Emotional%20Skills%20-%20Well-being,%20connectedness%20and%20success.pdf%20(website).pdf/ >.

D. Why Beliefs About Emotion Matter: An Emotion-Regulation Perspective < https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721418806697/ >.