Importance of Trust in Marketing: Analysis of Ethics of Representation

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Looking to focus upon the ethics of representation within this essay, it appears paramount to define certain terms that will be covered in this reflective piece; ‘ethical marketing refers to the process by which companies market their goods and services by focusing not only on how their products benefit customers, but also how they benefit socially responsible or environmental causes’ (Shewan, 2018). Further to this, I will be linking market segmentation, targeting and positioning to various other themes in order to develop these ideas – ‘market segmentation creates subsets of a market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria used to better understand the target audience’ (Qualtrics). Both of these special topics serve as superior elements to the overall theme that I will be developing within this essay – trust. Within this essay I will be considering the ethical uncertainties that surround marketing to children as well as the strength of celebrity influence within social media. In addition to this, I feel that market segmentation carries an important role. For me this has particular relevance as I am able to witness the effects of celebrity influencers on a daily basis via Instagram and other social media platforms. To avoid the manipulation of loyal consumers regulators such as the advertising standards agency aim to control the output of content from corporations looking to gain competitive advantages over rivals within an industry.

In my opinion, the most vulnerable individuals within our society to the manipulation of marketing are children, as they are heavily influenced by role models and are unaware of the intentions that businesses have. Children are often too young to understand the morals behind large corporations and therefore are more susceptible to the exploitation from advertisement. An example of marketing that demonstrates this is McDonald’s Happy Meals. McDonalds has been accused of deceptive marketing practices to children due to the selling and promotion of children’s toys in order to entice children to buy happy meals (O’Brien, 2011). Even though there are healthy alternatives available for children in happy meals, I believe due to McDonalds being a fast food restaurant that predominantly sells foods extremely high in fat and sodium, the temptation to choose unhealthy options is abundant. In my opinion, no unhealthy food corporations should be legally allowed to promote their food products to children for example with the use of toys or mascots e.g. Ronald McDonald. From my point of view, this behaviour in marketing techniques is completely unethical, as it may hugely contribute to child obesity. Creating an attractive ideology around processed foods is immoral, no matter how much more turnover a business may gain as a result. Another example of unethical marketing to children has been demonstrated in the tobacco industry. Cigarette packaging used to be covered in colourful patterns and designs, in order to attract teenagers and lure them in to the addictive and harmful habit. These designs are used to make them appear healthier than other cigarette packs, as research has supported this (cancer.ie). Slime line cigarettes have also been created to appeal to the market segment of young women who are trying to achieve an elegant and glamourous persona (Cancer.ie). Thankfully, in the UK, coloured packaging for cigerattes was banned in 2017 (Wiki). I completely agree with this law, as the designs for certain cigarette packs such as Benson and Hedges were blatently trying to target young teens and adults due to them being the ‘only sources of replacement smokers’ – RJ Reynolds, 1984 (Cancer.ie). Personally, I can not comprehend how advertising lethal and addictive habits to young adults and teenagers can be considered ethical behaviour, especially with the now known health risks that smoking causes. I believe that more should be done in order to prevent the manipulation of young people, who can be easily induced into harmful habits, especially by large corporations who appear to be trustworthy. Another example I would like to mention is the inappropriate advertising of marketing weight loss and diet pills to young people, in particular young girls. This is very relevant to me, as a young girl who spends hours on social media each day, the rise in unrealistic body standards is becoming a cause for concern. Businesses such as Cute Nutrition are specifically aimed at women, however due to their use of pink colours and fun fonts, I believe that these techniques are implemented in order to attract young teenage girls and women. I understand that businesses need to appeal to their target market which can be achieved in packaging and designs, however, I struggle to agree with the morals behind targeting young women with diet pills, especially with the increasing role of social media and young influencers being chosen by businesses to promoting these products, creating intense pressures around the way we look in ‘seflies’. This leads on to my next point on the ethical debates surrounding celebrity endorsements.

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Watching FRYE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened on Netflix completely opened my eyes to the potentially destructive power celebrity influencers hold over their following. Celebrities such as Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin all took part in the lavish promotion video, selling a ‘transormative experience’ (The Guardian, 2017). The festival was a complete disaster, and festival go-ers were left fighting for beds. The celebrities involved in the promotion of Fyre Festival ‘are not the victims: They are the perpetrators of irresponsible marketing that fails to consider the consumer’ (Richardson, 2017). These influencers failed to mention the fsct that the Instagram videos and posts that they were posting were all part of a paid partnership, which encouraged thousands of niave followers to purchase the expensive tickets in order to become more like their ‘idols’. Law suits were created, however these celebrities have suffered no consequences from this (Petter, 2019). After hearing the experiences from victims of this festival fraud, I believe celebrities should take responsibility for the quality of the products and services they are promoting. Influencers earn enourmous profits on every sponership, all because of one invaluable element to marketing that their followers all have in them – trust. Personally, the most important aspect I took away from watching the documentary was the importance of not breaking the trust of consumers in order for a business or individual to act in an ethical way. Especially with high end, luxurious products and services that consumers expect to be of a high quality due to the ‘recommendations’ of their role models. However, I believe a benefit to come out of the festival catasrophy is the tighter sponsorship regulation that the Federal Trade Commission have emphasised, in order to ensure consumers are aware and can therefore ‘take it with a pinch of salt’ (Kleinman, 2019). This helps to maintain trust in the relationships between a business influncers and their consumers, and avoids acting in an immoral way.

Marketing segmentation in my opinion, is an indispensable strategy carried out by many of the worlds most successful businesses such as Coca Cola (Ijbmi), demonstrating the importance of evaluating geographic, demographic and psychographic variables etc. in order to have the most effective and cost efficient marketing. I believe market segmentation provides businesses with the ability to ‘get to know’ their consumer preferences with specific detail in order to ensure they are kept up to date with everchanging external factors such as social changes in taste and behaviour. Personally, I think this is vital in order for businesses to stay competitive, as it is often hard when operating with mass production rather than niche to really get a grasp of what consumers are looking for in a product and the different needs that are required to be met for each market segment. For example Coca Cola’s main target market is young adults who feel the need to be more ‘energized’, however, by using market segmentation Coca Cola was able to see a market segment who enjoyed Coca Cola but chose to live a healthier lifestyle whom were choosing diet alternative fizzy drinks from other competitors. Coca cola had ‘an in-depth knowledge’ of their target consumer, and were aware of the obesity issues rising in America (Coca Cola). Diet coke was invented in order to gain “a better experience in the diet segment than the consumer had been getting” (Coca Cola) and therefore, Coca Cola was able to market to healthier consumers much more effectively through comercials featuring people with muscular six packs et (such as ‘Diet Coke Break – 95 on Youtube) . From reading many articles on the development of new products from market segmentation, I now realise how crucial segmentation is in order to create a loyal consumer base with the most successful marketing techniques, who will continue to repeat purchase over other competitors. When target markets are split up into segments, it allows businesses to carry out more specific market research and adapt to have the most advertisement for all ranges of customers. I believe that market segmentation is vital in order to build a strong relationship between a business and its customers, as it allows businesses to analyse the wants and needs of all of their customers more effectively and meet these customer needs in order to ensure customers feel as so they are listened to and that the businesses cares about their lifestyle and opinions consequently building an unbreakable trust of consistently high quality products and services that meet specific and niche requirements of customers. During sixth form, I completed Young Enterprise. The programme gives young people the opportunity to start up and run a business of their own during their time at school (Telegraph, 2009). As one of my roles being in our production team, I was able to carry out market segmentation for our consumers. Our main segments included young girls and pubs, as we were selling indoor light decorations. This segmentation enabled our marketing team to gain knowledge of the best routes to take for advertisement. We chose Instagram posts to target young girls and a Facebook page for reaching pubs as according to CBS Network, 76% of teenagers use Instagram compared to 46% using Facebook (Nuskool). These pages were our entire source of marketing, and helped create a reasonable turnover considering we had no experience. I believe this demonstrates the power of market segmentation in choosing the best path to target separate groups of consumers and create large and loyal followings who trust the businesses. You can view our Instagram page at https://www.instagram.com/spectrum.wycombe/.

I believe market segmentation is also incredibly valuable in order to successfully exploit the marketing opportunities that celebreity influencers provide businesses. Without market segmentation, the processes of indetifying the influencers who will provide the most benefits becomes much more complex than it needs to. An excellent example of a business that demonstrates this is Calvin Klein. Calvin Klein have used many celebrity endorsements each of which deomonstrate a particular market segment. Margot Robbie (vouge) targets middle aged women, Jamie Dornan (Justin, 2018) targets middle aged men, Justin Bieber targets teenage boys (Justin, 2018) and Millie Bobby Brown (vouge) targets teenage girls. Each of these celebrities have been chosen for a specific market segment with different needs and role models. In my opinion, this amplifies the significance of market segmenting as it enables large businesses to particular demographics, in this instance different ages and genders of consumers, in order to ensure marketing is targeted effectively. These celebrities have a huge following on social media platforms for example Justin Bieber has 124 million. All of these fans look up to these celebrities and see them as role models who they asipire to be like. Their followers have a great deal of trust for them, and trust that any product or service they promote and claim to use is of a high quality and will help them to ‘be like them’. This is why I feel so strongly on the ethics behind celebrity endorsement, as I see it as completely immoral for influencers to promote a business which sells terrible products and claim that they love them. However, I believe that if the post has clearly been labelled as a paid partnership, consumers must be aware that this bias is very real, and false opinions are given daily by celebrities to their followings, all to earn money. I beliebe celebrity endosemenets are incredibly beneficial to businesses and can create a large volume of sales, however, I think businesses need to become more aware that with increasingly strict sponsorship rules on social media platforms making it very clear to followers that the celebrity is being paid, consumers will start to look at other reviews which hold no bias, and so products must achieve their portrayed standard.

To conclude, I believe ethics, celebrity endorsements and market segmentation have all been shown to have an immense role in the creation of trust and faith between businesses and their consumers. Personally, I follow many influences on Instagram and YouTube, all of which I trusted to promote products that they believe are of a high standard. However, after many influencer disasters that I have read about while writing this essay such as Frye Festival, I am now not niave to sponserships and I will carry out further research for non-bias reviews online before purchasing any sponsored products. Trust is ‘to believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you, or that something is safe and reliable’ (Cambridge dictionary). I believe trust will always be an essential aspect of businesses creating a positive brand image and should be involved in all fundamentals of businesses not just marketing for example trust in leadership.

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