Tag: bait-and-switch

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Greenwashing, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

Last night, I signed a petition created by Rep. Joe Kennedy about gun control. The page gave me the option to share on Facebook, and I did. Then I went to bed.

I was pretty horrified to check my page this morning and see my share that said “Stand With Rep. Joe Kennedy” and had a huge picture of him. Not a word about gun control showed up in the Facebook preview.

So I took it down and posted this note:

To those who might have wondered why there was a huge campaign ad for Rep. Joe Kennedy on my page last night. I had just signed a petition he originated on gun control, and wanted to share it. I didn’t check how it posted on FB. I felt tricked and betrayed enough to take the entire post down. Let him get signatures some other way.

This was a classic bait-and-switch. In fairness, Kennedy probably delegated this to some social media intern and most likely wasn’t personally involved. But if I lived in his district, this would make me look for someone else to vote for, because I don’t like being manipulated and cheated.

Only after I took it down did I think about blogging about this feeling of betrayal. If I’d decided to blog before I instinctively took it down, I would have grabbed a screenshot to post here. Instead, you get the logo of the ultimate-bait-and-switcher: Volkswagen.

Aging Volkswagen showing VW logo. Photo by Daria Schulte.
Aging Volkswagen showing VW logo. Photo by Daria Schulte.

VW, of course, preyed upon environmentalist car owners to sell them a low-emission vehicle—but fudged the test results and was really selling highly polluting cars. This is costing the company billions, and it isn’t over yet. The state of Vermont just filed suit against VW two days ago. Vermont, tiny as it is, has the second-highest per-capita concentration of VWs in the country (after Oregon)—precisely because environmental consciousness is extremely high among its residents. In fact, a year ago, a group of those Vermont residents already filed a class-action suit against Volkswagen.

I used to think my parents and in-laws were overreacting with their continuing pledge never to buy Volkswagen s because of the company’s involvement with the Holocaust. After all, the people who made those brutal decisions are long dead or in nursing homes. But after this scandal, I can’t think of any reason why I would ever trust the company again.

Bottom line: in business and in politics, bait-and-switch has no place in ethical marketing.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , ,

But why would you want to? If you want to market dishonestly, the person you’re really fooling is yourself. Because it is not effective in the long run, and the long run is what builds a business.

Two examples:

The Secret Spammer

Someone posted this on a LinkedIn discussion today:

 The promotion plan used by [company name] works very well. [company URL]

Always on the lookout for good resources for myself and my clients, I clicked through. First thing I saw was the same guy’s picture, so this was not exactly an unbiased recommendation. And then after clicking in a couple of pages, I found this:

The email blast and daily email advertising to 4 million recipients will cost you only $35 for a lifetime membership. (not included in the package) However, you will learn how to use emailing effectively, what company or companies to use, and how to effectively send email ads.

4 million e-mails a day over multiple days? If that’s not spam, I don’t know what is.  There’s no way this list is targeted, and there’s no way it will help the reputation of any product associated with it. So I responded:

I am sorry, but I looked at your site, Fred (and it would be nice if you were more up front about your relationship to it)–you’re going to send 4 million e-mails for an author? That is SPAM–a wretched curse on the planet. It makes everything else you offer to do suspect.

I have a section in one of my books called “Spam–the newbies’ natural mistake.” You’re not a newbie, though. The site is professionally designed and convincing on first glance. So you know better. Why are you doing this?

If you use sleazy, illegal, unpleasant tactics, that’s how people will think of your book. I will NOT be recommending this one to my clients.

The Bait-and-Switch Home Contractor

A few months ago, I bought a Groupon from a heating-duct cleaning service. But when the technician arrived, he told me the $69 duct cleanout was only good if I first signed up for a $1900 heating system overhaul. No upgrade? Then no work.

This is dumb on so many levels! First of all, you never require an upsell. That’s called bait-and-switch, and is illegal, for good reason. Second, if you try to upsell somebody, your offer should be in tune with the original price. so maybe you offer a $99 or $109 upgrade to your $69 original offer. You’re not going to get many takers if your upsell is 27.53 times the original price, pushing it from two figures to four. Third, if you want to sell someone something 27 times the original price, you need to build trust and show you’re capable of the small stuff. And fourth, if you’re using an outside lead generation system (in this case, Groupon), you don’t want to piss them off. I am sure I am not the only one who got a full credit of my $69 from Groupon, which offers a satisfaction guarantee. How willing will Groupon be to ever work with this company again if some huge percentage of sales have to be refunded?

As Abraham Lincoln allegedly said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

And as I say, “if you build a business by fooling people, the worst fool is yourself.”

In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I talk at some length about long-term customer relationships—how they are key to repeat business, and how repeat customers are five to ten times more profitable than using traditional marketing to bring in new customers. If you have to keep dredging the lakes for people you haven’t ripped off yet, your business is not sustainable.

So, for both ethical and practical reasons, do the right thing and don’t be like either of those fools I cited.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Trends/News, privacy, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Computer guru Tim O’Reilly makes a half-hearted attempt to justify (or at least explain) Facebook’s latest privacy grab. But I find the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bill of Rights for social media users (which O’Reilly quotes at length) much more compelling:

Users have the right to:

1. Honesty: Tell the truth. Don’t make our information public against our will and call it “giving users more control.” Call things what they are.

2. Accountability: Keep your word. Honor the deals you make and the expectations they create. If a network asks users to log in, users expect that it’s private. Don’t get us to populate your network based on one expectation of privacy, and then change the rules once we’ve connected with 600 friends.

3. Control: Let us decide what to do with our data. Get our permission before you make any changes that make our information less private. We should not have data cross-transmitted to other services without our knowledge. We should always be asked to opt in before a change, rather than being told we have the right to opt out after a change is unilaterally imposed.

4. Transparency: We deserve to know what information is being disclosed and to whom. When there has been a glitch or a leak that involves our information, make sure we know about it.

5. Freedom of movement: If we want to leave your network, let us. If we want to take our data with us, let us do that, too. This will encourage competition through innovation and service, instead of hostage-taking. If we want to delete our data, let us. It’s our data.

6. Simple settings: If we want to change something, let us. Use intuitive, standard language. Put settings in logical places. Give us a “maximize privacy settings” button, a and a “delete my account” button.

7. Be treated as a community, not a data set: We join communities because we like them, not “like” them. Advertise to your community if you want. But don’t sell our data out from under us.

[This last sentence is O’Reilly’s and not the Chronicle’s] Everyone is right to hold Facebook’s feet to the fire as long as they fail to meet those guidelines.

Yes, the Chronicle Bill of Rights seems like common sense ethics to me. The problem is that I am not convinced Facebook’s latest privacy grab is even close to meeting these guidelines. Zuckerberg and others can continue to push the frontiers, but they should do it in ways that respect their members.

Personally, I go into the online world with the expectation that there is no privacy. And therefore the specific changes don’t bother me over-much. But as someone who writes about ethics, I have a problem with obtaining consent for one restricted set of behaviors and then wildly expanding it while requiring opt-out (and difficult opt-out at that) rather than opt-in. It’s nothing more than an electronic form of bait-and-switch–something I find unethical and in fact argue against in my latest book on business ethics, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

Yet in the video included in the blog, O’Reilly makes a compelling case that Facebook’s privacy failures and the resultant pushback are essential to pushing the frontier, and that a lot of the innovations that seemed to threaten privacy were actually welcomed once people got used to them. O’Reilly says he’s more worried about Apple than Facebook. I, however, worry more about Google (which he also mentions in the video), which owns an extreme amount of personal data and has a very cavalier attitude toward copyrighted material

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