Content marketers have a responsibility to their brands – but also to their audiences and their ethics. What happens when these interests conflict?
It's our job and our responsibility to create messages that help our employers attract attention and, ultimately, sell products or services.
But we also have a responsibility to the audiences we create – and to our personal sense of right and wrong.
By Gina Balarin
Brands face more pressure than ever – from consumers, employees, and shareholders – to “do the right thing” when it comes to societal issues.
Our words are scrutinized, shared, commented on, and acted on. And they should be.
Which leads me to ask: Are brands wielding that power responsibly? And what does responsible use of content’s power look like?
What happens when a brand's values don’t align with the audience’s best interests? What happens when our values as content leaders don’t align with our employer’s values?
Coming to grips with how to apply ethics to everyday content and marketing decisions is hard. There are no easy answers.
That’s why I’ve gathered various pieces of insight, advice, and a few examples to help you choose a path that feels both responsible and ethical to you.
I’m willing to bet most content marketers want to feel good about the work they do and the impact they have on their audiences. I know I do.
Whether we know it or not, we live by a code of ethical conduct – at work and home. Our ethic compass points toward “good” behavior.
Ethics.org.au defines ethics as “The process of questioning, discovering, and defending our values, principles, and purpose.”
Unfortunately, even the definition of ethics isn't easy to pin down. Or is it?
Trent Moy, a marketer-turned-advisor who runs a consultancy specializing in ethics, culture, and corporate responsibility, believes the definition of ethics in marketing is simple: It’s how we make a decision when something important is at stake.
And since we make decisions all the time, Trent says, ethics permeate everything we do in business and marketing. Fortunately, he says having the desire to make quality decisions means you’re already behaving ethically.
Wordsmiths have the power to inspire change – especially behavioral changes – and that makes ethics especially important, says Simon Longstaff, author of Everyday Ethics.
But it's easy to cross a line. “Marketing at its best informs and inspires, but it doesn’t manipulate,” he says.
Not every marketer succeeds in drawing the line in an ethical place. In the foreword to Chris Arnold’s book Ethical Marketing and the New Consumer, Kelvin Collins writes:
“For some, the word ‘marketing’ seems unethical. After all, it’s the driving force behind churn and this instant, disposable society we live in.”
Brands (and marketers who work for them) can’t afford to lie today. It’s too easy to be found out – and it’s definitely not profitable.
Sometimes, though, “truth” isn’t easy to establish, and marketers have to make decisions based on murky information.
That can lead to a moment when the best intentions go horribly wrong –a moment I call the "Oops!”
Two recent content examples perfectly illustrate the oops feeling when brands don’t stop to think about their ethics or don’t believe they’re important.
Consider the Clorox ad called Playground, which was well-intentioned when it first aired in December 2020. The ad shows a child running eagerly toward a playground only to stop to wait while a teacher sprays Clorox disinfectant on a cloth to wipe down the equipment.
Viewed today, though, it misrepresents a situation that could spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As an article in Marketing Brew pointed out, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recently said the chance of contracting COVID-19 from surfaces is low.
“It got us thinking: Is Clorox advertising addressing valid concerns or playing on our fear?” asked Marketing Brew writer Ryan Barwick.
When the ad debuted in December, disinfecting was still part of the recommended approach to reducing the risk of contracting COVID-19. The choice to keep running the ad seems questionable, as Christine Alemany, CEO of creative agency TBGA, said in Marketing Brew:
The campaign “leverages the fear that parents have of school reopenings.”
It “ignores the overall safety of outdoor playgrounds that fresh air and sunlight provide, which misrepresents the risks around COVID-19 and may harm a brand’s credibility,” she explained.
The second example illustrates the power struggle between an organization’s leader and employees. Cathy Merrill, CEO of Washingtonian Media, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that employees who want to continue to work from home are risking their jobs.
The D.C.-based magazine’s leader wrote:
"I estimate that about 20% of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities – ‘extra.’ It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday – things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.’
"Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match, and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes – benefits that, in my company’s case, add up roughly to an extra 15% of compensation."
That piece prompted immediate backlash from The Washingtonian's staff.
Nearly 25% went on strike, refusing to publish content on the magazine’s site the day after the op-ed appeared. They told The Washington Post that they read the op-ed as a direct threat.
Did someone on her team, a content writer, or a PR team member help Cathy craft that piece?
How did the poor writer get stuck in a situation where they had to support what amounted to an attack on their job? What would you have done in that situation?
Marketing should be an inherently noble profession because, as Trent Moy says, it’s about meeting someone else’s needs – providing a customer or stakeholder with the best possible option they can choose.
Trent suggests that you’re already behaving in a way that meets the definition of everyday ethics if you are asking yourself questions such as:
Would asking these questions have helped the content producers make different choices in the oops examples I mentioned? I hope so.
Marketing results increasingly show that when marketing puts audiences’ hearts and minds at the forefront, passion and creativity create strong chemical reactions that engage audiences, encourage customers, and make prospects want to buy.
Neil Patel has talked about how emotional targeting converts more leads. As an example, Conversioner increased the number of paying users for one of Asia’s biggest online dating sites by 340% simply by sharing photos of a diverse range of happy people (their potential users).
Conversioner increased the number of paying users for an online dating site by sharing photos of a diverse set of happy people.
There’s a fine balance between using emotions as manipulative tools or for genuine human connections. How do you tell the difference?
The authenticity of truthful human stories brings on a feeling of overwhelming pride. When done well, content marketing helps a brand’s ethics shine.
Two examples come to mind. The first one still makes me cry when I watch it, eight years after it launched. That’s the Dove campaign for Real Beauty and its YouTube video: Dove Real Beauty Sketches.
In this video, they don’t just embrace diversity; they help people be more conscious about how they judge others and themselves. Watching the video forces viewers to ask, “Is it OK to judge women harshly? Is it OK to judge ourselves like that?”
In doing so, the viewer goes through the “process of questioning, discovering and defending our values, principles, and purpose.”
The second example comes from a campaign I worked on. Mercer’s consultants recorded a video about their work improving careers for special education teachers in Singapore (click the image below to watch on LinkedIn).
The video illustrates the process the consultants followed on the project. You can see how this work helped them identify and define their values. You can sense the pride they shared. You can see the purpose they found.
You can even sense the struggles they overcame, personally, while consulting on an ethically challenging topic, namely, how special education teachers are rewarded.
This video captures how Mercer consultants overcame personal struggles while working on a project about how special education teachers are rewarded.
To take a phrase from the video, “Through this project, the public will know that even students with special needs deserve teachers of the highest quality.”
Trent Moy says that the most practical way to address ethics in business is to be conscious of the values used in making a decision.
That’s what the leaders of recipe site Epicurious did when they stopped featuring recipes that use beef:
"For any person – or publication – wanting to envision a more sustainable way to cook, cutting out beef is a worthwhile first step. Almost 15% of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it); 61% of those emissions can be traced back to beef. Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork. It might not feel like much, but cutting out just a single ingredient – beef – can have an outsize impact on making a person’s cooking more environmentally friendly.
"Today Epicurious announces that we’ve done just that: We’ve cut out beef. Beef won’t appear in new Epicurious recipes, articles, or newsletters. It will not show up on our homepage. It will be absent from our Instagram feed.
"We know that some people might assume that this decision signals some sort of vendetta against cows – or the people who eat them. But this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!). Instead, our shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders. We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet."
Interestingly, Epicurious stopped publishing beef recipes almost two years before it announced the change. And once the team was ready to explain it, they took care to anticipate and address reader questions and concerns:
"Some of you will have questions (we’ve tried to anticipate those questions and answer them here). Some of you will wonder if Epicurious has become a site with an agenda. Rest assured, the beef recipes that were published in 2019 and before are still on the site; they are not going anywhere. Likewise, Epi’s agenda is the same as it has always been: to inspire home cooks to be better, smarter, and happier in the kitchen. The only change is that we now believe that part of getting better means cooking with the planet in mind. If we don’t, we’ll end up with no planet at all."
Now that the word is out, they might lose readers. But they’ve taken action based on their values and what they see as the best interest of society at large.
Perhaps they don’t need to worry too much. Brands like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s have big content plays based on their ethics that could have worked against the business – and yet both are still admired, healthy brands.
Making conscious decisions also means being prepared to challenge thinking we disagree with rather than going with the flow. Here’s what Trent suggests:
"Be aware of what shapes our decisions – social conformity, external pressures, and so on. Make conscious decisions – don’t just go with the flow."
Let’s be practical, though.
Many brands can be viewed as ethical in some areas (see Apple’s new app tracking transparency feature) but fail miserably in others (Apple has a woeful history with environmental and human rights concerns.)
And let’s be realistic. Not everybody’s in a position to risk their employment to stand up for their values. In that case, an ethical decision might mean thinking through the consequences of saying something vs. the consequences of saying nothing.
If you’re the team leader, the responsibility rests heavily with you. Marketer and author Luvvie Ajayi Jones addressed this point in her talk called Speaking Truth to Power at Content Marketing World 2020: “If you’re the person who’s been at the company for 15 years and has amazing job security, what’s the consequence you’re afraid of?”
As you think about the ethical considerations of what you write, it’s possible to find yourself in a situation where your ethics conflict with your employer’s ethics.
In that case, you face a choice. You can try to make a change from the inside or choose to move on (as nearly one-third of Basecamp employees said they would after a controversial memo from the company’s founder.)
It might be enough to write content that doesn’t disappoint your audience or to market with greater empathy.
The important thing is, as Trent says, to do something. “Doing is important. Maybe even more important than deciding.”
As wordsmiths, we have the power to change the world: One sentence at a time. But if you, as a content marketer, feel like you might be too small to make a difference, I’ll leave you with these words:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead CCO
Gina Balarin isn’t just an inspirational TEDx and keynote speaker, storyteller, and B2B marketing leader, she is an MCIM Chartered Marketer, with a master's of education in management communication and a member of the Professional Speaking Association. The author of The Secret Army: Leadership, Marketing and the Power of People, among numerous other texts, Gina’s goal is to magnify the impact of her clients’ influence through her expert guiding hand, visionary consultancy, and authentic storytelling prowess. Connect with her on LInkedIn.
