With Deceptive Marketing, the Ends Don’t Justify the Means

Offering a statistic about homeless families in the U.S. is not as viscerally disturbing as an image of parents and children living on the street; telling someone the number of children afflicted by hunger and malnutrition does not grab someone by the collar, shake them, in the same way an image of an emaciated child does.

But are certain representations of poverty unacceptable, even if they increase donations to a good cause?

This is the question at the heart of research by Deborah Small, professor of marketing at Yale SOM. “How do people judge different persuasion tactics used to increase humanitarian aid?” asks a new article coauthored by Small, Shannon Duncan from the University of Pennsylvania, and Emma Levine from the University of Chicago. “Are some tactics judged as more acceptable than others?”

In a series of experiments, the researchers find that tactics perceived as deceptive are considered more troubling than tactics that objectify the subject of a marketing campaign, or that simply manipulate the observer’s emotions.

The first set of experiments asked people to assess the ethicality or moral acceptability of five different marketing tactics that have faced criticism: using an actor; using a stereotypic image of poverty; using a staged photograph; using a celebrity; and depicting an aid recipient’s worst moments. Across these five approaches, participants ranked methods that deceive the audience — hiring an actor or staging a photo — to be less acceptable than the other tactics that are more exploitive, objectifying, or manipulative.

Small and her colleagues then untangle what, specifically, it is about deception that people consider most troubling. In two further experiments they find that people see false representations of reality — an actor posing as a person from a poor village — as more troubling than cherry-picked portrayals of a situation in which the image might exaggerate the severity of circumstances or only show the worst case. This is true even if the artificial scenario more closely resembles reality.

“A striking takeaway of the evidence...is that there is greater concern about whether a representation is genuine (vs. artificial) than whether it distorts the accuracy of perceptions,” the researchers write. “An artificial portrayal is deemed more wrong than a misleading portrayal as long as the misleading one contains a kernel of truth.” In other words, an actor portraying a realistic scene is viewed as more problematic than a real picture representing only the most extreme conditions.

A final result of this study pertains to the organizations themselves. Participants in this research judged organizations that used deceptive tactics more harshly than those that did not. They considered them less likely to be honest in other situations, which suggests dishonest tactics in one domain might be used as a diagnostic tool for an organization’s overall moral character and future behavior; strategies for short-term gain may hobble long-term consumer trust and allegiance.

The researchers note how these findings illuminate an interesting divergence between what is socially acceptable in interpersonal relations and what people expect of larger organizations. “In interpersonal exchanges, people often tell prosocial and ‘white’ lies to be polite or to protect others from emotional harm. People often see these lies as ethically acceptable,” they write. Yet organizations — charities in this case, though the findings likely extend to other organizations — that are depicting poverty for prosocial causes should tread carefully when designing campaigns to appeal to donors. “Just because the behavior is in the interest of ‘good’ does not mean that people will find it okay.”

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