Ethical marketing campaigns promote products honestly and highlight the good companies do in the world. Rather than trying to manipulate an audience, an ethical marketer’s goal is to inform and engage without making misleading claims. Strict adherence to marketing ethics can help you build up your brand reputation—and prevent you from running afoul of the law. This is especially important in the age of social media, now that small businesses can reach bigger audiences than ever before.
What is ethical marketing?
Ethical marketing is a philosophy that centers honesty, transparency, and social responsibility in promotional and advertising strategies. Ethics are relevant to every step of the marketing journey, including market research, designing and deploying campaigns, and day-to-day maintenance of a brand’s reputation.
Why is ethical marketing important?
- Reducing legal and reputational risks
- Attracting value-aligned employees and partners
- Creating a better business climate overall
Practicing ethical marketing builds long-term consumer trust and brand loyalty. But it has other practical benefits, including:
Reducing legal and reputational risks
In general, employing ethical marketing practices reduces your business’s risk of costly lawsuits and regulatory penalties. Ethical considerations tend to be a step ahead of actual regulations, so keeping your business practices within the generally accepted ethical parameters of today can minimize disruptions if regulations are tightened tomorrow. And even if you don’t get sued or fined for breaking the rules, social media platforms can remove your content and individuals can use their accounts to publicly criticize your brand.
One of the most common examples of legal risk involves copying TikToK trends. “A lot of marketing these days is based on trends,” explains Rachel Karten, a social media consultant and author of the newsletter Link in Bio. “Whether it’s an artist’s work or a person who has a viral sound on TikTok, you don’t own the rights to those.” Repurposing audio from one TikTok video in another is standard practice on TikTok, but it can carry risk for brands. “Ask an artist or ask a creator of a sound if you can use their work, and if they say no or don’t respond, respect that boundary,” Rachel says.
Attracting value-aligned employees and partners
Employees and potential business partners who care about accountability and transparency will be more excited to work with a company or brand that shares those values. After all, like attracts like.
Ethics isn’t merely an outward performance, something demonstrated only in your brand’s messaging. Your brand values should inspire every element of the business, including the people who make up its staff and the external partners who provide critical resources.
Creating a better business climate overall
Companies that employ ethical marketing practices can attract potential customers who care about corporate responsibility (a growing share of the customer base, according to a McKinsey study). Other businesses will observe these benefits and may embrace ethical marketing themselves—contributing to an all-around healthier, responsibility-minded business environment.
Principles of ethical marketing
1. Empathy
Empathy, in a business context, means a profound understanding of and respect for your customers’ needs, sensitivities, challenges, and perspectives. Employing empathy in your ethical marketing means creating messages that affirmatively resonate with real human experiences, rather than exploiting vulnerabilities.
Some examples of marketing tactics that prey on vulnerabilities include targeting the elderly with complex financial products, marketing insurance policies with fear-based tactics, or preying on body insecurities to sell diet supplements.
Empathetic marketing considers the emotional and practical impact of campaigns on various audiences, and it ensures that marketing efforts help solve real problems. For example, lifestyle golf brand Eastside Golf emphasizes inclusivity in a sport that’s typically seen as having a high barrier to entry. The brand places a special emphasis on making golf accessible to youth and non-golfers.
2. Honesty
Honesty in marketing is the practice of making claims about products or services without exaggerated or misleading claims. This might mean using real customer testimonials, showcasing realistic product results, and conspicuously disclosing product limitations.
This principle extends beyond the point of sale to customer service touchpoints, warranty fulfillment, and even processing returns and exchanges. Promoting honesty in marketing is about maintaining consistency between the content of marketing messages and the actual customer experience.
Honest marketing can build trust by aligning the reality of the product or service with customers’ expectations. Yes, deceptive advertising can lead to short-term gains, but it often results in damage to long-term customer relationships—and sometimes even legal troubles.
3. Transparency
Transparency is about having nothing to hide. It involves being clear and open about all aspects of your business practices, including:
- Specific language. Instead of describing a product as “all natural,” an ethical marketer might share specific ingredients and sourcing information.
- Clear pricing. You might be tempted to attract budget-minded shoppers by advertising a low base price without disclosing additional fees or restrictions, but customers are likely to feel duped, which can erode trust.
Ethical marketing best practices
- Compile an ethical marketing policy guide
- Build an internal fact-checking pipeline
- Promote an ethical workplace culture
- Authentically communicate your values
A lot of ethical marketing talk is highly theoretical. It can be a challenge to imagine how these practices work in the real world. With that in mind, here are four ethical-marketing best practices you can put to work today:
1. Compile an ethical marketing policy guide
Develop written ethical standards and guidelines for your business’s marketing practices. This guide should clearly define what claims can and cannot be made, set standards for data collection and usage, establish review processes for all marketing materials (including who has final sign-off), and explain internal consequences for violations.
Examples of best practices that you can outline in an ethical marketing policy guide include:
- Disclose sponsored content. Clearly mark sponsored content and influencer marketing partnerships on your social media pages, and ensure your partners do the same on theirs.
- Be clear about consumer data collection. When collecting customer information through email or newsletter signups, be explicit about how you will use, store, and eventually dispose of the data.
2. Build an internal fact-checking pipeline
Marketing materials should go through a thorough vetting process. Designate one or more team members to fact-check all claims made in marketing materials and record their findings in reports.
Those compiling marketing materials that contain fact-based or statistical claims or rely on scientific studies should document and archive those sources for later review. You might also want to have an attorney evaluate potentially sensitive marketing claims.
3. Promote an ethical workplace culture
Attracting ethically minded marketers to your company is essential to building a humming ethical marketing machine. But it’s also important to regularly reinforce ethical principles within your teams and to get employee buy-in toward your mission.
You can do this by establishing inclusive peer reviews of marketing strategies (and other areas where business ethics are concerned). These reviews should include your marketing team, but they can also include staffers from other parts of your business who come into contact with customers or partners that might be consuming your messaging.
Ethics should also inform how you treat your employees from the top down. For example, Rachel Karten notes a growing trend of businesses incorporating their staff into social media video content. In some cases, content like this can be quite relatable and popular with customers, turning staffers into beloved “characters”—in effect, marketing assets of the brand themselves. Rachel advises businesses who go this route to tread carefully.
“Most employees don’t have ‘appear on camera’ in their contracts. Assuming that every employee at your brand wants to be on camera or wants to be a personality is something to watch for,” she says. She suggests employers give employees total discretion as to whether they appear in company content—and pay special attention to avoiding any pressure or undue influence that may make someone feel less comfortable opting out. If participating in on-camera marketing work adds significant hours to an employee’s schedule, they should receive compensation for that time.
4. Authentically communicate your values
In an ideal world, the messaging would always speak for itself, but sometimes customers need a little contextual help to engage with what your brand is trying to achieve.
Rachel suggests founders and other key players show their commitment to their values by becoming thought leaders on their personal platforms. This might include founders posting on LinkedIn or CEOs contributing to the site’s blog. Sometimes the most effective way to communicate your values is for an influential member of the company to talk about the brand’s ethos directly to the public.
Ethical marketing FAQ
What are unethical marketing practices?
Unethical marketing practices are:
- Unempathetic. They are not responsive to customers’ real needs, and they often create solutions in search of a problem.
- Dishonest. They rely on exaggerated or downright false claims.
- Opaque. They rely on vague language or intentional omissions.
- Unrealistic. The express marketing promises that aren’t in alignment with your business’s ability to follow through on those promises.
- Unsustainable. They’re flash-in-the-pan solutions, or they aren’t replicable or profitable over the long term.
How do you advertise ethically?
Ads, as an extension of marketing, should adhere to the five basic principles of ethical marketing. They should be empathetic, honest, and transparent; your business should be able to fully follow through on whatever the ad is promising, and the design and messaging thereof should be sustainable over time.
What are the benefits of ethical marketing?
Some of the benefits of ethical marketing include higher customer retention and brand loyalty, legal and regulatory risk mitigation, and an overall better business climate.
