Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

I think that undercover marketing is unethical in a sense that people should have the right to know what messages they are exposed to. On the other hand I think that undercover marketing is ethical in a way that we all have our own responsibility when it comes to buying things and we all have our own taste in clothes or products, no matter how often we see them passing by. So I'm two sided. I'm also not all negative about undercover marketing because I think that it is a really interesting social and psychological phenominon. It raises questions like: Are we really just that simple as human beings, that we want to do what other do and have what others have? Are we already buying things because other people are walking around with it? Is undercover marketing not something we secretly want, because really all that we want is too 'fit in'. To conclude, it is a very interesting topic. And maybe in the gray area when it comes to ethical or unethical.

I'm a little bit two-sided as well. Maybe it is wrong to push your products in peoples faces just like that, but you're not hurting anyone with it..
Maybe they should have a way in between, like the people coming up to you should wear some kind of tag, so you can regocnise them as half-undercover? of maybe afterwards they should tell you they are involved in sth like this? I'm not sure.. And I agree with Janneke, it is still up to you to either buy or not buy the product. they're not taking anything from you, merely pointing out a nice product (even though they don't tell you they're from that particular brand themselves).
I can't just say 'yes' or 'no', both answers can be argued for.

I find Guerrilla, Gorilla, Undercover, Blitz marketing not only very interesting with regards to imagination but especially to effectiveness. Having said that, they can backfire - completely.
If people feel that they''ve been had, and start talking about it, no matter how cool or thoughtful your initial campaign were, the damage could become huge.
This means that a plan B has to be part of the undercover plan just in case.

Mikael
B2B Social Marketing

Hmm, let's see.

Undercover marketing (buzz, viral, manufactured hype .... call it what you will) can ... and frequently does ... strain the boundaries of credulity when the subject (or perhaps the act) is used as an excuse (or perhaps a vehicle) for people to manufacture content, or for them to post links on authority sites, in order to appear productive.

In the world of finance, when one person on the inside receives notice of a deal that could benefit other people, and those other people on the inside then act upon that information in order to make personal gains, it's known as insider trading, for which people go to prison.

In the world of commerce and marketing, things are slightly different.

Let's say that someone new to the business of marketing, perhaps a junior marketer or an intern for a company with clients along the lines of Honda, Pepsi, and Johnny Walker posts content in the form of a question a public but industry related forum.

With me so far?

Now, let's say that the junior marketer gets the wild and crazy idea to suggest to a few friends (who might also be junior marketers for other companies in similar niches) that they ought to answer the question, in an attempt to pad the content out and make the original poster, and their link, somehow more valuable in the eyes of ... oh,
I don't know, let's say, a search engine, or perhaps connected with a college grade.

Still with me?

Although technically, those junior marketers have done nothing wrong or unlawful, and wild and carefree though
they might think they've being, those self same junior marketers might ... just might, be jeopardizing their collective futures ... both online, and in their desired niches.

Why might that be?

Well, in the world of multi-million dollar marketing deals, when content (viral or otherwise) is posted on a site to which the poster has no server access is content that remains online for a very long time. And that content leaves a set of digital fingerprints—fingerprints that can be obvious, or that can be telling over the course of time.

Now then, search phraseology being what it is, and online profiles being what they are, and job searches also being what they are, it's sometimes only a matter of time before the movers and shakers acting as CEOs of the companies in question (or of other companies ... companies to which the junior marketers might as yet have no connection, but for whom they could, hypothetically, wind up working one day) connect a certain number of dots ... dots that could come back to hurt their company, and perhaps their high paying clients ... clients that command multi billion dollar marketing budgets ... budgets that steamroller over the career aspirations of junior marketers with hardly a wobble.

When all this happens, as it can, from time to time, careers can and do south.

Sometimes rapidly. Been there. Done that.

Personally, although I have no vested interest in this (entirely hypothetical) situation, I would so hate to see it happen to someone else.

So my best advice to one and all is to be incredibly careful about anything undercover in the world of marketing. Transparency all the way: that's the ticket.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Princeton, NJ, USA