Ethical Marketing Sometimes Means Saying “No.”

Ethical marketing sometimes means saying no, even in the face of a stacked system.

Marketing professionals are often rewarded for recommending more marketing.

More campaigns. More advertising. More spending. More work for us marketers.

But when a client comes to you wanting to spend more money on marketing, sometimes your job is to tell them “No.”

That sounds backward. Saying yes gets us paid. But when you know a campaign is unlikely to succeed, accepting the work is not the right thing to do. It’s taking money to execute a plan you know, or at least are fairly confident, won’t deliver the desired results.

Clients are not just paying marketers to execute a plan. They are paying us for the judgment to know whether the plan is worth pursuing.

Ethical marketing vs. ethical marketers

I’ve long tried to practice “marketing without manipulation”: promoting products and services without exploiting the people you are trying to reach.

But ethical marketing also requires honesty with the people paying for the work.

That became clear earlier this week when a client was interested in launching search ads in a highly competitive field. Given everything I knew, the ethical route was to say no and defer the project.

A campaign destined to fail

This was a longtime client whose business and advertising strategy I knew well. We were already running search ads for several of his business lines.

But this new project was in a field I knew had incredibly high cost-per-click rates. At those prices, the client’s budget would generate too few visits to give the campaign a realistic chance of success.

There is a point with Google Ads where a campaign budget is simply too small for the cost of competing in a particular market. When the budget can afford only a limited number of clicks, the campaign may not generate enough data for effective bidding and optimization.

All that to say, if the target budget is too low relative to the average cost per click for the keywords you are targeting, the campaign is unlikely to succeed.

And here’s where marketing ethics comes in. If I charge to set up an ad campaign for a client, which I do, and I know a campaign is likely to be unsuccessful, which I did, it is unethical for me to take on that project and charge for that work.

The customer isn’t always right

I’ve said this for years, including back when I worked at marketing agencies: The customer isn’t always right.

Sometimes they don’t know how a system works. Sometimes they don’t know whether the tactic they have in mind will actually help. Sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know.

That is why they hired a marketing professional.

So when a client or potential client comes to you with a project you know is highly unlikely to deliver results, your job is to say “No.”

The first question is simple: Given what I know, is this campaign likely to succeed?

If the answer is no, the marketer’s job is to say “No.” But saying no to a bad plan is only the first step. The real value of the marketer is in solving the harder puzzle: finding a different approach that gives the client a better chance of reaching their goal.

An ethical marketer’s job is to get creative

Budget waste is a weird and quixotic issue. Your client comes to you wanting to make more money by spending more money, and you profit by helping them spend that money. So why would you tell them not to spend it?

Because spending money on the wrong thing is a waste that can devastate a business of any size, all the more so a small business with a limited marketing budget.

The advertising industry can feel patently unfair, and that’s only because it is.

Advertising is fundamentally an attention economy, and buying attention has been hit with almost devastating hyperinflation.

But when only the largest companies can afford to participate, it prevents small businesses from garnering attention. So how can those smaller businesses hope to break through? The system is built so they can’t.

Some fields have enough room for smaller businesses to meaningfully participate in the contest for attention. Other fields have become so completely dominated by a few giants that there is no room for a smaller competitor.

David vs. Goliath

The role of an ethical marketer is not to put clients on the same field as the giants and watch them get crushed. The role is to get creative and find a different approach that can work for them.

Malcolm Gladwell’s“David and Goliath” makes this point well. David was an underdog only if he agreed to fight Goliath the way Goliath wanted to fight: up close and on Goliath’s terms.

David chose a different field. He used the strength he actually had.

Small businesses have to do the same. They cannot always compete on scale or spending. The marketer’s job is to find the advantage they do have.

That alternative will look different for every business. It might mean shifting the budget into content, partnerships, direct outreach, referral systems or a stronger customer experience. The point is not to replace one default tactic with another. It is to find the approach that fits the client’s actual resources, strengths and goals.

Connection and empathy are today’s “ranged weapon”

The simple truth is that in an era when only giants can afford true economies of scale, the one thing their deep pockets cannot purchase is authentic human connection.

For small businesses, getting creative in the face of stacked opposition means finding ways to put the resources you have into more personal, authentic ways of connecting with your target audience.

I know a lot of small-business owners hate to hear this, but sometimes that means taking the money you would spend on advertising and putting it into another aspect of your business to free you up for more connection-focused efforts. Advertising feels like the best way to reach a lot of people without a lot of work. Sometimes there’s just no replacing that work.

I know a lot of marketers hate to hear this, but sometimes being an ethical marketer means telling the client that conventional marketing approaches just won’t work and that it would be a waste of their budget and time to chase results that can’t be had.

In this AI-crazed era, dominated by giants with advertising budgets larger than the operating budget of most small countries, where we could all be replaced by robots tomorrow… our creativity and connection are our best advantages.

Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash‍       ‍