How ethical is your marketing?

NOTE: It takes courage for a trade journal to risk offending readers by challenging unethical practices. My compliments to Deliver for running this piece. Click here if you prefer to read it on the Deliver website.

A recent clinical study has shown that hiring my agency reduces your risk of getting cancer.

I conducted the study myself. It’s poorly designed, shamelessly biased and wholly unscientific, but that doesn’t mean I can’t slap words like “clinical” and “study” on it. And though I’m no attorney, I’m pretty sure that, with carefully chosen weasels and the right disclaimers, I can use it to relieve the gullible of cash while I avoid fines and jail.

OK, OK. I’m not serious. At least, not about offering my shop as a cancer preventative. I am quite serious about the ease with which one can mislead while remaining technically within the law. In fact, if you work in direct marketing, you may someday be asked to execute such a strategy. What course will you choose?

I hope and suspect that most of you would decline any product that relies on blatantly false claims (“Take this pill tonight and wake up a millionaire tomorrow”). I think we’d also dismiss as foolhardy anyone who insists upon full, unvarnished disclosure (“Please buy our cologne, but face it, nothing short of overhauling your looks and personality will get you dates”). The real dilemmas lurk in between, in those darned shades of gray.

It doesn’t help that each shade is only slightly lighter or darker than its neighbor. One person’s “OK” may be another’s “not OK.” I recently declined a prospective client whose product was popular, legal and backed by testimonials from happy customers. I turned it down because blinded tests showed the product to have no effect. Colleagues accused me of being too stringent. If customers are happy, they argued, no harm done. They would have taken the account. I would have thought no less of them for it.

Six ways to keep direct mail ethics in check

How much or how little gray you’ll abide is your decision. What’s important is to draw that proverbial line, and to draw it well before you need to refer to it. Ethical challenges seldom seem to come along when declining is convenient. One well-funded company has a habit of reappearing and asking me to reconsider their flimflam products only at times my shop needs business most.

As you ponder which products to accept or decline, and which tactics to embrace or reject, here are six points to consider:

1. Does the small type contradict the large? Not all fly type is underhanded. Much of it is useful and appropriate. But when what’s buried in fly type is the antithesis of what’s conveyed in headlines, subheads and body copy, it suggests something about the overall integrity of the piece. Not to mention of the advertiser.
   
2. How many weasels will you indulge? Here’s a revealing exercise: count the use of terms like “may,” “can,” “believed to,” “said to,” “no claim is made,” “not evaluated by,” “not intended to,” “not typical,” “may vary,” “not verified by” and so forth. See if the total falls within your personal limit.
   
3. Get real. Come on. You know when “results may vary” means “works nine out of 10 times in properly conducted, controlled tests” vs. “works no better than you’d expect from randomness.”
   
4. Does evidence back the claim? If your client and 1 million passionate customers assert, but cannot demonstrate, a claim — on demand and repeatedly — you have testimonials, but not evidence. Given the power of testimonials in direct mail, that’s good reason to check the evidence before using them.
   
5. Do you use the product? Does the client? When a company selling a get-rich-quick scheme contacted me, I found it telling that none of their employees — even those who were great at selling the product on the phone — used the product themselves.
   
6. Would you recommend the product to your kids? How about to your aging, fixed-income parents?
   

Not everyone agrees that marketers bear responsibility for what and how they sell. The prospective buyer, they say, is free to check facts. But search the how-to literature of direct mail. It brims with advice on building credibility, winning trust and giving readers information for taking immediate action. We cannot urge readers to buy now and then blame them when they do.

Most direct marketing is aboveboard and honorable. But I’m painfully aware, as I’m sure you are, of glaring exceptions. I hold no delusion that drawing a proverbial line will bring such practices to an end. But there’s no need for you and me to take part in them.

Direct Mail and the Gorilla in the Room
Steve Cuno’s latest article in Deliver magazine

Note: Per its editorial policy, Deliver omitted the names of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons from its published version of this article, plus made other, sundry changes. Chabris and Simons graciously provided me with advance permission to use their names, so the article appears here as originally written. You can view a PDF of the current issue of Deliver, where this article appears on page 8, by clicking here.

Imagine watching a half-minute video in which two teams pass a basketball. One team wears black shirts, the other wears white. Your task is to count how many times the team members in white complete a pass. If you are like most people, chances are you will report the correct number of passes. But there is about an even chance that you will completely miss the woman in the gorilla suit. Even though she walks through the game in plain sight, including pausing to face the camera for a bit of chest-beating before striding off.

We think this may provide a clue as to the continuing power of direct mail in an increasingly online world.

By means of the gorilla challenge and other ingenious tests, cognitive psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have demonstrated that, try as we may, we humans simply cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. And though Chabris and Simons never marched a gorilla past a mailbox — at least, as far as we know — we cannot help seeing a possible connection between their research and this tidbit from a recent survey: about 79 percent of households read or at least skim their advertising mail, whereas only about 19 percent of commercial emails are even opened.

The same survey reports that it is emails from unknowns, or with too-long or irrelevant subject lines, that tend not to win attention. Seen in light of the gorilla test, this is hardly surprising. When people check their email, they rivet their attention on the “From” field for names they know and like, and on the “Subject” field for short, relevant items. When minds are engaged in that manner, emails from strangers, or with irrelevant or too-long subject lines, may as well be invisible gorillas, chest-beating and all. Assuming, that is, that they evade spam filters in the first place.

By contrast, as people retrieve and sort through their mail, they must focus on each piece one at a time in order to settle on which ones they will explore further. In its moment, each piece — including advertising mail — commands full attention. And not just so that people can avoid inadvertently discarding letters, bank statements or bills, either. Three out of four Americans say they like, trust and read advertising mail. In fact, for new product announcements, the open rate for direct mail is about 1.7 times that of commercial email. That includes Generations X and Y, even though they grew up with the Internet. 

Moreover, a visit to the mailbox is a daily, anticipated event. Most people look forward to it. And, conveniently for advertisers, it’s an event that takes place away from the competing clamor of TVs, computers, stereos and video games.

The gorilla challenge and other ingenious tests are described in Chabris’ and Simons’ book The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. To view the above-referenced video and test your friends, visit www.invisiblegorilla.com. 

Meanwhile, there’s no need to don a gorilla suit and saunter by a mailbox to prove that direct mail packs a punch. Direct mail’s unassailably high open and response rates, along with survey data, do that on their own. So if you’re looking for a solid way to keep the market’s eye on the ball in an online world, count on direct mail. It is the antithesis of the invisible gorilla.

Hmm. If “the antithesis of the invisible gorilla” becomes the next slogan for the USPS, remember, you read it here first.

—Steve Cuno