Most of us were raised in a society in which businesses were not held accountable for their actions. So long as they made money, generated profit for their shareholders, and delivered their customers a passable product, they were applauded. But this is no longer the case. Today, consumers really care about the ethics of the brands they engage with, which makes the practice of ethical marketing more important than ever.
Recent consumer studies show that the ‘buzz’ around business ethics is one of the most important considerations for your potential customers. Whether or not your company’s business practices hold up to a prospect’s ethical considerations is key to determining whether they’ll give you a chance or not. Naturally, you still have to have a high-quality offering and consistent customer service to back up your ethics, but when this holy trinity comes together, it can be a truly winning combination.
Skip to:
- What does it mean to ‘market with ethics’?
- Why does ethical marketing matter?
- The 5 key pillars of ethical marketing
- The 3 pitfalls of paying lip service to marketing with ethics
- How to effectively implement ethics into your marketing strategy
- Conclusion
What does it mean to ‘market with ethics’?
There are two key components to ethical marketing: the marketing campaign itself, and the brand behind it.
At its core, to market with ethics means to advertise both your brand and your offering accurately, honestly, and with genuine, proactive consideration for the people and places involved.
As beefound.agency’s managing director, Tom, puts it: “It’s about just doing business properly! Treating your customers and clients how you would want to be treated.” A solid starting point for those new to the concept might be to check out the UK-based Good Business Charter, of which beefound.agency is an accredited member.
Why does ethical marketing matter?
Let’s get one thing straight: ethical marketing is not just a sticker you can slap on your brand to make it more appealing to millennials and Gen-Zs. It takes time, investment, effort and a genuine desire to improve your business practices in order to become a truly ‘ethical’ company.
Thankfully, the effort required does not negate the payoff—in short, marketing ethically is not some resource-draining tick box; it is a serious step on the path to commercial success.
By investing in the ethics of a brand, to be able to market yourself as such, businesses are helping to create a more profitable and equitable economy for all. By treating their employees, workers at each stage of their production pipeline, the environment and their customers more fairly, local businesses become more sustainable.
In financial terms, the perks are also many. For example, take a recent Harvard study on the effects of gender equality (a key aspect of business ethics) on revenue. The study revealed that companies in the top 25% for gender equity were 27% more likely to outperform their industry average for profitability.
This has been going on for a long time. A 2019 article showed that customers were more committed to brands whose ethics aligned with their own, and were even less sensitive to price changes—being willing to pay more for a product or offering they knew to be ethically sourced, produced and, importantly for our purposes, marketed.
The 5 key pillars of ethical marketing
Whether you’re a local, bricks-and-mortar Yorkshire-based business, or a multinational e-commerce brand with offices across the globe, the key tenets of ethical marketing remain the same. Here, we’ll walk you through five pillars foundational to the practice of building a more morally-conscious and accountable business. These pillars are based on the ten ethical ‘commandments’ of organisations like the Fairtrade Foundation and Good Business Charter.
Pillar 1) Transparency
Absolutely crucial to the success of your brand’s ethical makeup is your approach to transparency: that includes both transparency between management and employees, as well as between brand and customers.
In the past, even household-name businesses thought of as reliable producers would use dishonest tactics to gain a competitive advantage. Classic examples include:
- The 2017 ‘batterygate’ scandal: Apple devices were updated with a software patch that deliberately throttled battery performance. And whilst CEO Tim Cook alleged that the patch was done in good faith—to prevent unexpected shutdowns—many Apple users felt unfairly forced into upgrading their older devices.
- The 2015 ‘dieselgate’ scandal: It was discovered that car manufacturer Volkswagen (VW) had been fitting ‘defeat devices’ to its diesel cars to ensure they passed environmental emissions tests. In reality, many of their diesel cars emitted up to 40 times the nitrogen dioxide limit during real driving conditions.
- The 2018 Facebook scandal: CEO of Meta (then Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg, was called before US Congress in an inquiry into the sale of millions of Instagram and Facebook users’ data to a company called Global Science Research, without those users’ explicit consent.
In each of these instances, the companies in question profited hugely from the devious business decisions they made, only to have those profits sapped in lengthy court cases and settlement payouts further down the line.
Whilst corporations as all-powerful as Meta, Apple and VW might have survived these transparency scandals, their reputations remain tarnished. Moreover, for smaller businesses—especially those which rely on the patronage of local communities—abuses of transparency would more likely end in failure and bankruptcy.
Pillar 2) Respecting consumer privacy
In our increasingly digital age, people are understandably concerned about how their data is collected and used by the companies they interact with online. A person’s data is, after all, a reflection of the person themself—it can contain sensitive information such as their address, their credit score, their name, gender, sexuality, family situation, right down to their shopping habits.
As we saw with the Facebook scandal of 2018, ‘harvesting’ and selling data to third parties is a common practice for digital brands. Certainly, selling user data to advertising companies can be a lucrative additional income stream for, say, e-commerce brands. Nonetheless, a majority of UK consumers say that, when making purchasing decisions online, it is important that brands respect their privacy.
To ensure data privacy for your consumers, it is critical that your website is transparent about the data it collects, whilst also giving visitors to your site the option to limit the data harvested to the absolute essentials (you’ll have come across options to accept or reject ‘cookies’ yourself, when visiting almost any site these days).
Furthermore, when harvesting data consensually, you should consider using server side-tracking versus client side-tracking, as it provides greater security and anonymity. UK and EU businesses must also legally adhere to GDPR regulations regarding the storing and collection of customer information.
Pillar 3) Sustainability
Unlike Volkswagen’s approach to sustainability, a truly ethical business takes its impact on the environment seriously. Acknowledging the ongoing climate crisis and your business’s contribution to it, using metrics like carbon emissions, is a good place to start. Of those British consumers for whom a brand’s ethics is the most important factor in deciding who to shop with, “environmental/climate change issues” was at the top of the list of ethical concerns.
Not only is investing in environmental sustainability good for the planet, though—on which, let’s remind ourselves, we all do business and without which we couldn’t do any business at all!—but it’s also good for your bottom line.
Despite all the talk from certain right-wing parties in the UK right now about Net Zero goals hurting the economy, the evidence would actually suggest the opposite. For example, better waste management alone can lower operational costs by as much as 10%!
It’s worth noting here that sustainability also includes how sustainable your supply chain is on a people level. It’s all very well your coffee being organically grown, but if the people who pick it are being unfairly exploited for their labour, your newfound ‘sustainability’ won’t matter a jot.
Pillar 4) Equality, diversity and inclusivity
Equality, diversity and inclusion—EDI for short—has been a bit of a ‘buzzword’ in business circles since the UK introduced its Equality Act 2010. When it comes to ethical marketing, though, it’s not enough to simply pay lip service to these principles.
We’ve seen plenty of companies send delegates along to partake in LGBTQ+ Pride marches come Pride Month (June), for example, which is a good first step, but to be truly ethical, these gestures must be grounded in a work culture which is genuinely diverse, equal and inclusive.
When you get to thinking about it, it’s pretty simple. EDI just means ensuring that everyone—no matter their age, race, sex, gender, sexuality, ability, class or background—is treated equally and compassionately by your company. And once again, studies show that companies who do invest in diversity reap the benefits.
Pillar 5) Accountability
Last but not least, to market your brand and product ethically, you must also be accountable—both to your employee base and your customers. Accountability is essentially the concrete foundation into which the other four pillars of ethical marketing are set. Accountability means taking responsibility for your business’s actions as well as its intentions.
It also means proving, clearly and accurately, that you put your money where your mouth is—that you can back up your gestures toward sustainability, privacy, EDI, and transparency with measurable steps taken and roadmaps for change going forward.
The 3 pitfalls of paying lip service to marketing with ethics
We’ve touched on some of these already, but here’s a slightly closer look at the three principal pitfalls companies have historically fallen into when attempting to market themselves more ethically.
- Greenwashing, pinkwashing, ethics-washing: Simply saying you are something doesn’t make it so. Dove’s campaign to normalise different body types in its advertising is a brilliant initiative, for example, provided its work culture is also diverse and inclusive. Trust in the intelligence of your customers: if you only paint over the cracks in your company, they’ll see right through you.
- Making vague claims: Some companies may try to skirt the issue of ethics in marketing by making vague claims, which can’t be pinned down: the types of claims that suggest that they operate ethically without actually saying how. The danger of vague claims is that, whether or not you are actually operating ethically, they immediately read to the prospective customer as though you are not.
- Prioritising profit over privacy and people: Historically speaking, companies tended to care about one thing and one thing only: money. And whilst money certainly is key to your business’s success, just as important are the people and planet who make you that money. Prioritising profit over people and their privacy might earn you a quick buck—as in the case of Facebook’s data-selling scandal—but it’ll come back to haunt you in the end.
How to effectively implement solid ethics into your marketing strategy
By considering, discussing, implementing and investing in our five pillars of ethical marketing, you can create a brand with longevity, loyal customers, and dependable turnover. Here, however, are a few additional tips and checks we’ve found to be helpful to our clients in helping them manage their business reputations.
- Respond promptly and professionally to online reviews, taking feedback on board and building a stronger, more transparent relationship with your customer base.
- Use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to convey to prospective clients right off the bat what your ethics are and how they benefit your offering.
- Make the most of UGC (user-generated content) such as positive reviews and viral content containing your product or mentioning your offering—consumers trust each other more than they trust brands to tell the truth about a company’s ethics.
- Adhere to clear, transparent standards of ethical business practice, such as those drafted by the Financial Conduct Authority and Information Commissioner’s Office here in the UK.
- Market your ethics like you’d market yourself—you can tell people about the hard work you’ve done, just remember that no one likes a braggart.
The bottom line on ethical marketing
Marketing makes most people think of a poster, billboard sign or advert on TV or YouTube. Ethical marketing, however, must go deeper. Marketing ethically is about building a truly transparent, sustainable, equitable and inclusive, considerate and responsible company, so that when you come to market yourself and your offering, you can do so with a clean conscience. Importantly, you can also do so knowing that any genuine investment in your company’s ethics will pay out dividends.
To make a start, learn more about how the work we do at beefound.agency can help your business ‘bee’ the best it can be through ethical search engine marketing that puts the consumer first. On a reading roll? Then you might also want to check out the rest of our blog.
