I used to be an academic (that was one of my careers). In one of my classes, I was discussing the need to be honest in the dealings with the customers – not manipulating them but servicing them with dedication and the tender loving care – treating them like someone who pays our wages.
A student (I was teaching the final year of the Bachelor’s course) in the class said that honesty was NOT needed and to my point that customer would eventually see through any manipulation he replied “we just need to be smarter than the customer”. I argued that we can never be smarter than the customers…customer is not a simpleton. As David Ogilvy said “Customer is not stupid. It is your wife”.
Perhaps that is how most businesses treat their customers – manipulating and trying hard for the customer NEVER to find out about the manipulations.
Marketing Manipulations
After this conversation in the class I started a research project for a few years (along with a colleague) about business ethics among the students. Students filled out a questionnaire in their first year of their degree and the same questionnaire again in the final year. We wanted to see if actually education taught them the manipulations. We did this with Accounting students and Marketing students. Certainly, overall, the final year students’ ethics were more questionable than the naïve first year students.
Interestingly, we also found that Accounting students complied with ethics were far more than the Marketing students. So, I wondered aloud in a class if the marketing profession attracted people who by their very nature have questionable ethics and became a subject for their wrath for a couple of weeks 
.
Do you think marketers manipulate?
Since Google started the Pay per click (PPC) advertising method, the academic inside me has been very happy. Now businesses can make advertising more accountable. We don’t need to throw away thousands of dollars every year without knowing what results we would get. With pay per click advertising, every dollar is accountable – we know how many clicks, how many visits, how many conversions etc. What a blessing!
Incidentally, I find that the companies who use both the traditional advertising and pay per click advertising, ask for the return on investment (ROI) before they would spend extra $1000 on PPC campaigns but don’t ask questions before spending or increasing the spend on traditional media!
Be fair and challenge both media !
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