Ethical Marketing: Will All Pop-Up Users Burn in Hell?

Shane Melaugh:
Hello, and welcome to the Active Growth podcast. In this episode, I don't know what number it is, but in this episode we're going to talk about ethical marketing. This is a topic that was brought to my attention by one of my students in one of my courses, and it relates to, it is inspired by a different podcast. There was a podcast called the Gray Matters podcast with Steve Dotto.

In episode six, he talks about ethical marketing. One of my students listened to this episode and had some questions about it and asked me for my take on it. I listened as well and I think it's a very interesting topic, in general, not just ethical marketing but ethics in general. It's something that interests me, and so I wanted to make kind of a response or just an inspired by, whether it is basically my thoughts on this topic. Of course, I'm going to link to this episode. In the show notes I'm going to link to the Gray Matters podcast episode which you can listen to. You can go and listen to that first if you want. You can also listen to it afterwards. It doesn't really matter. I'm not assuming that you've heard that episode.

Shane Melaugh:
The one thing that I want to say here to introduce this is that, I think, in this podcast episode the host, Steve, makes a very important point early on which is he says that there's a difference between things that are annoying, that we find annoying, and things that are actually unethical. I think that is a very important distinction, and I think he misses the mark later on. That's one of the reasons why I'm making this episode. I'm not just pointing to, oh yeah, that's my opinion, what was said on this podcast episode is what I agree with, because I see things a bit differently, and also, like I said, it's a very interesting topic so I want to get into it.

Shane Melaugh:
And to introduce this I want to give you kind of a metaphor or an analogy for this which is concerning the fear of sharks versus the fear of cows. How afraid are we of sharks and how afraid are we of cows? The reason I bring this up is because, actually, if you look at the statistics, more people are killed by cows every year than by sharks. The reason this happens, of course, is that both incidents are extremely rare. Nobody is in real danger of dying from a shark attack or dying from a cow-related incident. What happens is that very, very rarely someone swimming somewhere gets attacked by a shark, very rarely. Almost never happens. And also very rarely, but less rarely, someone working on a farm, in a slaughterhouse, whatever, someone interacting with cows also gets in an accident and might get trampled to death or something like that. Might get injured, stabbed by a horn or something and also dies. Both of these things happen extremely rarely, but of course, nobody ever thinks about being afraid of a cow because a cow seems harmless and a shark seems terrifying and so we're afraid of sharks.

Shane Melaugh:
And similarly, we tend to kind of worry about the wrong things. We have irrational fears and irrational concerns based on kind of our emotional responses to things, based on our gut responses to things that sometimes, or often, have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I think that ethical marketing question is exactly one of those things. We have a gut response to certain things. They annoy us, they make us angry, and sometimes it doesn't feel like a strong enough thing to say, "This makes me angry," or, "This is annoying." I don't want to say, "This is unethical," or, "This is a scam." But I think we have to be, I want to show a perspective, kind of a shark deaths versus cow deaths perspective on this because I think we often direct our outrage in the wrong places.

Shane Melaugh:
That is the topic of today's episode and you'll be able to find show notes, including a link to the Gray Matters podcast episode on this topic in the show notes, which you can find at activegrowth.com/ethical, activegrowth.com/ethical. Also, if you have any kind of comments, if you have a question you want to ask or anything like that, you can also go there and you can leave a comment or a voice message on that post. So with that, let's get into it.

Shane Melaugh:
I'm going to talk through several examples of things that typically are kind of a question of, is this ethical to do? We'll talk about pop-ups, our light box opt-in forms that interrupt the visitor. Is that ethical? Is it ethical to use countdown timers and fake scarcities? Is it ethical to use prerecorded webinars, auto webinars? Is it ethical to do presaleing, so to sell a product you haven't created yet? I'm going to talk through some scenarios.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, first, I want to, to put this in context, let's talk about what does it mean whether something is ethical or not? Of course this is a very complicated question. You can read libraries worth of books on this topic where many people have spent their lives thinking about what is and isn't ethical. Now, I want to make this very simple. I'm just going to give you a very, very simple model of what I think is useful to apply to this case which is, basically, two questions. Number one, how much good does it do? And number two, how much harm does it do? Of course, good and harm, again, can be very complicated to try to define that, but, again, to keep this simple, let's look at good done to and harm done to human beings, and let's define good as increasing someone's quality of life, increasing someone's happiness, increasing someone's sense of fulfillment, so the kind of thing where people would report, "Yes, this has improved my life." If it has that effect, if something you do has that effect on people then that is good, it's doing good.

Shane Melaugh:
And harm is the opposite. Harm is decreasing someone's life quality by putting someone at risk, causing problems for someone, causing any kind of suffering for human beings. That is harm done. All right? I would say that a very simple model of ethics is where you can look at how much good does it do? How much harm does it do? Kind of put that on a balance, put that on a scale, and anything that does clearly more good than harm can be qualified as ethical, and anything that does clearly more harm than good can be qualified as unethical.

Shane Melaugh:
Then, the final question here, another thing that I want you to keep in mind and I'll talk about more later as well is, we also have to think about how much, to what degree, does something do good or harm? This is basically a question of leverage as well. So there's certain things. You can make big moves that effect many people in a big way, or you can make small moves that effect very few people in a small way. That matters.

Shane Melaugh:
One of the reasons why I'm defining this as a framework to think about the question of ethics is because I want to get past the gut reaction thing. Past the thing where something is annoying and we go, "This is unethical", "This is a scam," because we feel annoyed. It's an expression of anger. But our emotional response to something is not a good indicator of whether something is ethical or not. Anything that causes this kind of annoyance causes a mild amount of suffering. Being annoyed is a form of suffering. If you do something that causes people who encounter it, let's say the pop-up on your website, it causes them to suffer, it causes them to suffer annoyance. That is harm being done but it's a small amount of harm being done, and probably not to that many people. All right?

Shane Melaugh:
With that let's go into examples. Let's go into a bunch of examples before we kind of go any further on this. Let's start with a typical thing that a lot of people get very annoyed about and people in the internet marketing space often get quite emotional or heated about, is the question of what's often falsely called pop-ups which is actually a light box, a light box opt-in form where someone clicks through to your blog post, they want to read the blog post, but then this thing pops up in their face that says, "Hey, sign up for this thing." It is interrupting the visitor. They wanted to read the article and now you're pushing something else in their face. Many people are very annoyed by this and would then call this unethical.

Shane Melaugh:
But this, again, if we think about how much harm does this do? How much harm does this do? Well, not much because the suffering it causes, the harm it causes, would be this kind of annoyance, but there's a very, very simple and easily accessible option out of it. Right? The thing pops up, you can click on the close button and it's gone. Then, to some degree, how much you choose to be annoyed by that is up to you because it's perfectly possible and perfectly reasonable to visit a website, pop up comes up, you close it and just keep reading and you're fine. Right? It is reasonable to expect that this won't ruin anyone's day and won't cause a big amount of suffering for anyone. All right. And that's why I would say that. It's just not that harmful. Right? It's just not a big deal. So even if you find it annoying, calling it unethical, I think, is an abuse of the term. Bringing ethics into this seems exaggerated.

Shane Melaugh:
Also, another thing which I also kind of steer towards here is the pop-up itself, the light box, the interruptive thing itself, I think is not unethical. The contents of it could be, but nobody ever complains about that. The complain about being interrupted, but really it's like we're looking at the wrong thing because depending on what's in that pop-up, I think it can be ethical or unethical. I'll get back to that in a bit, but let's go through more examples. What about scarcity? What if you use scarcity in your process, in your funnel on your sales page, or wherever on your website? Let's say you have a countdown timer on your sales page so you have a limited time offer. Is that ethical? It puts pressure on people. What if you have limited quantities? If you say, "There's only 500 copies of this thing," even though it's maybe a digital product and you could sell unlimited of them, but you officially limit the quantity, is that ethical?

Shane Melaugh:
Or what if it's even automated? What if it's like evergreen? You tell someone, "Hey, look, there's only two days left to get this offer," but actually it is that individual is seeing a two-day limit and someone else who signs up next week will see an individual two-day limit again. Again, it's not really real scarcity. You could absolutely just sell it to anyone without any time limit, at any time, but you have set up a system that creates a time limit and that creates this pressure. Again, this is something, of course, a lot of people find annoying, but it's also very common. It's something you very commonly see because it is a huge driver of sales. You'll see that if you basically threaten to take something away, you'll see a huge spike in sales from that, so of course many businesses do that.

Shane Melaugh:
Is that unethical? Well, I think that one thing that depends is whether it is deceptive or not. I think that deception, lying essentially, is unethical. It's mildly unethical. And it's mildly unethical because the more people do it, society-wide, the more people are deceptive towards each other, the lower everyone's life quality becomes. We'd all be much better off to live under circumstances where everyone's always being honest. That would reduce suffering overall. Of course, everyone wants to be the only liar. This is how we end up in the world we live in. I do think that lying, deception, is mildly unethical because it does do some harm, but it does harm on a relatively small scale. Making people believe that this is a live, counting for everyone, countdown when it's actually an individualized evergreen countdown, is mildly unethical because you're deceiving people.

Shane Melaugh:
I think it could be just as effective if people basically know that this is an evergreen thing. If you say, for you, this is a special offer for you right now. You have two days to decide. I think that wouldn't lower the effectiveness of it at all. You could do that. And then again, it becomes basically annoying, but it doesn't do any real harm. One of the things, the gut reaction we get to saying, "There's something wrong with this. I don't like this." I think it comes from pushing people off the fence, which is something that you have to do a lot or that's basically one of the things you would be doing in most marketing, especially in direct selling, is that anyone who comes to your sales page, let's say, where you offer your product, most people will sit on the fence. Some people will be like, "Yes, I want this right away." Maybe the read some of your copy for a bit of extra convincing, but they're basically already onboard and they're going to buy. Some people are going to see it and they're just going to be like, "No, never. I'm never going to buy this," and they're going to leave.

Shane Melaugh:
But most people are going to sit on the fence. They're going to look at the product and say, "Well, yeah, this might be really good for me. This might be exactly what I need. But should I buy it now or later? Should I spend this amount of money? Is this in my budget? Maybe I could save this for something else." Whatever. They're sitting on the fence and simply not making a decision. And so a lot of copywriting and a lot of things like scarcity are essentially pushing people off the fence saying, "Make a decision. It's now or never." And that feels, well, it's pressure and it feels like, well, that's not really a nice thing to do to someone and I tend to agree.

Shane Melaugh:
But again, I think the amount of harm that does is minimal. It's a very, very small amount of harm that does and it's not the biggest leverage point. If you push someone off the fence to buy a crappy product that they're going to be disappointed in and that's going to cost them a lot of money, that's unethical. That's where the real damage happens is because your product's crap and it costs too much and you're essentially doing financial damage to someone. That's bad, but whether or not there was a countdown timer on the page, that's not really the point because if you push someone off the fence to buy a thing that's really useful for them and they enjoy it and it's reasonably priced, then what harm was really done? The actual harm that was done is that you made them feel slightly uncomfortable by putting pressure on them. That's very little harm done.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, having said that, this brings me into the territory of a very common excuse or a very common thing that, I don't know, you hear with copywriting and marketing and stuff where it's like, "Oh, you know, you're doing people a favor. You're doing people a favor by basically pushing them into buying your product because your product is so great and they'll be happier by doing this." I think there's some validity to this because, again, if you take the model I presented, if the product brings real value into people's lives and all you're doing is, you're putting a little bit of pressure on them, you're doing this much harm and then you do this much good through your product, I think that is valid, at least in this simple model that I presented. You could say, "Yes, this is a good thing to do. You should do it."

Shane Melaugh:
But I also think that the more that you feel like you need to justify your actions with such thinking, the more I would examine what the hell you're doing. Okay? Because, I have to say, I often see people talk about this where it really feels like they're trying to make themselves feel good because they actually feel guilty about what they're doing and what they're selling and they're trying to convince themselves with this story. My note about this would just be, the more you cling onto a story like that, the more you should examine what you're doing because it's clearly a feeling of guilt there and maybe that's a sign that something should be done differently.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, let's go, next example. What about fakeinars? Where someone signs up for a webinar and it's like, this is a live webinar, but actually it's a pre-recorded webinar. It seems like they're joining a live webinar maybe even with chat and things like that and the host on the webinar is pretending like it's live, but actually they're just watching a video. Okay, is that unethical? Again, I think that this is a really clear example of something that's annoying that, if you join a webinar like that, you get really involved. Maybe you enter stuff in the chat, you don't get replies, and you say, "Oh, my god. This is a last minute offer," and you buy it and then you learn, oh, this is just a recording that runs all the time. You can feel really deceived and betrayed by that. It feels really bad.

Shane Melaugh:
Again, that causes a bit of suffering because of that and also it's deceptive. If you make people believe this one thing when it's not a thing, you're part of the problem and, like I said before, the more people that are being deceptive, the more people are lying about everything, the lower everyone's life quality becomes. So, yes, deception is unethical. Just like with the Evergreen countdown, I think that there is a solution to this, which is, you can use pre-recorded events and just tell people. You don't have to pretend like this is live.

Shane Melaugh:
You can say, "This is a limited time available recording." Another thing that I've seen done is that people will do webinars and they will make recordings available, but they will say, "Look, this recording's only available for the next three days and after that I'm going to delete it." Again, you can say, "Well, they don't have to. They could keep it available," and so on, but I don't see the problem with that. I don't see the problem with saying, "Look, this is a live thing or you can catch it in the next few days, but if you don't it's just over." There's nothing wrong with doing that even if people might be annoyed by it.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, let's get to an example that I think is a very important, which is, is presaleing a product that you haven't created yet unethical? This is probably why I was asked about this. This is probably why I was asked to give my opinion on this, because this is something that I do and that I teach. I have done this many times before. I've done it twice this year already where I sell a course and when the marketing for the course starts, the actual course doesn't exist yet. By the time the course kind of opens up, by the time people can buy it and get in, some of the course exists, maybe 20% to 30% or so of the course exists, but then the rest of the course will be rolled out over the coming weeks.

Shane Melaugh:
There's two versions of this. Let's quickly distinguish. There's presaleing where you basically say, "Listen, I'm going to make this course and you can pre-order it right now at a lower price and then once it starts you get in." That's one thing. The other thing is that you start to have the course and part of it is available, but not all of it. All right? Is that unethical? I think that the presaleing example is actually the simpler example because it's very clear. You say, "This is a presale." You're placing an order for a thing to get it once it is ready. And the other thing is, it's mainly about clear communication. This is actually something that happened with the two courses I launched this year. There was a communication problem because the first one, I launched it as a presale, so people knew I am pre-ordering a thing and I am going to get access to it in two weeks or something like that.

Shane Melaugh:
The second one was a, you could buy it and you could access it immediately, but only the first module was available out of three modules. This wasn't communicated very clearly. Not intentionally, we didn't try to deceive anyone, but we realized afterwards that, oh yeah, you could actually go through the sales page and it was easy to miss the fact that you were buying something that would be released over the next few weeks. We did get some people who felt disappointed because of that. I think that clearly illustrates kind of the ethical question here that if you're clear about what's happening, if you clearly communicate what's happening, then there is no ethical problem with that.

Shane Melaugh:
What we should have done in the second course, ideally, we would've been better at communicating, "Hey, buy the way, you can buy this right now and you can access module one right now, but all the stuff will be released over the next three or four weeks." But clearly that's not a problem because if you tell people straight up, "This is what's happening. You're pre-ordering a product. You get access to it later," they still buy it. Given the choice, as long as people aren't being deceived, it is not unethical to presale. Now, there's a specific reason why I do presaleing and why I also teach presaleing and that is that it is a way to develop better products. This is especially true with online courses.

Shane Melaugh:
With both courses I've done this year, these courses are better because I rolled them out like this. Because what happens is that people start accessing the course, they start accessing those first 20 to 30% of the course and there's comments. I interact with people and people ask questions and so on and based on those interactions, that shapes some of the rest of the course. In both of these courses there are parts of it that really were informed by the feedback I got from my customers. If I'm simply sitting by myself and trying to build the entire course, trying to build 100% of the course, kind of in my head and then I release it to customers, I will then find out that I missed the mark on some things or there's some questions that people have that I wasn't anticipating and things like that and so then I will have to maybe go back and make corrections and so on.

Shane Melaugh:
For me, doing a presale on a course is a way to kind of do a lean development of the course and I can course correct and I can change my structure slightly and in some cases I've had examples of this where I make fairly large changes based on, once I get customers and once I interact with customers and see, oh, there's something here that I didn't consider. That I didn't consider when I was planning the course and writing the outline and so on and it makes a big difference to the course and it makes a big difference to the quality of course that people get. Ultimately, this makes a better product and a better products helps more people achieve the desired outcome and that is good. That is doing good.

Shane Melaugh:
If you do a presale without deceiving anyone about it and you do it in order to build a better product for people, then it is an ethically positive thing to do it. It does no harm and it does more good. Here comes what I think is an important factor in the ethical question which is, are you acting in good faith or in bad faith? If you presale a course and you're doing it in good faith, which the intention is, presaleing the course will help me make a better course for my customers and I fully intend to do that. I fully intend to deliver on all my promises and I fully intend to work to make the best course possible. Then this is not a problem. You don't deceive people and you're acting in good faith.

Shane Melaugh:
If you act in bad faith, if you're basically saying, "You know what? I could presale this thing and get a bunch of people's money and then, whatever, maybe I'll just not deliver the course at all and like 20% of people will forget to ask for a refund or I'll just make people jump through a ton of hoops to get a refund and I'll still have some money left and I don't have to make an actual course." That's a scam. That's deception and that is acting in bad faith where you're basically doing something motivated by greed and you're intentionally looking to do harm to people for your personal benefit. That's a completely different story.

Shane Melaugh:
But again, note that you have to look at the right thing because the question of whether it's ethical or not is ultimately not dependent on whether you presale or not, it's dependent on what you do. There are many things that you can do in the course of a product launch that make it either ethical or unethical, but whether or not you presale isn't one of those things. It's not one of the indicators that tells you whether this is ethical or unethical. Now, another question here is, what if you're a beginning? What if you've never made a course before and you presale a course? Even if you're acting in good faith, what if it turns out that you're not capable of making the course that you promised, that you wanted to make? That becomes a problem then.

Shane Melaugh:
Again, it depends on whether you act in good faith or in bad faith. There's actually an example of this where I'm not going to name names, but recently there was a scandal that I kind of heard about where an Instagram fitness influencer was selling some kind of a fitness program or fitness coaching or something and she made tons of sales and she didn't deliver a product. Obviously people were very angry about this, but the thing is that her response to it was that she was basically saying, "Well, we were just overwhelmed. We couldn't handle all these orders. We were trying our best and we just couldn't." As far as I know, this is one of the reasons I'm not naming names is, I don't know if this situation has changed since, but when I heard about this, she was basically playing the victim, but she wasn't offering any refunds to anyone. She was basically saying, "Well, you should feel sorry for me because I was so stressed and so on. It was just a mistake I made, but I'm going to keep your money and I'm not going to deliver a product."

Shane Melaugh:
Well, that is acting in bad faith. I think the concern is, well, what happens if I fail essentially? What happens if I fail? Well, again, I think if you're not being deceptive and you're acting in good faith, it's not going to be a problem. Of course, if she was just honest and said, "Listen, before it's a scandal," the moment she sees, "Oh, my god, I can't deliver this thing," if she closed the cart and said, "Listen, update to everyone. I'm sorry. I'm totally overwhelmed. I can't do this. I'm sending out refunds to everyone right now." Of course, that wouldn't be great for her brand, but I think most people would forgive her.

Shane Melaugh:
Most people would be a bit disappointed, but I think a lot of people would say, "Yes, I get it. You tried this thing, it didn't work out. You just got far too many people or you got stressed or whatever, maybe some some personal issues got in the way. I'm disappointed I didn't get the product that I wanted, but I get it. You're a human being." I think most of her fans would not abandon her because of that. I think we tend to be forgiving when someone is being honest and vulnerable. But the way she reacted was basically to try and not mention it until people got super angry and then make an excuse and still not give people their money back. That's deceptive and that's unethical because you're doing financial damage to people and you're doing financial damage to people that you could easily avoid.

Shane Melaugh:
If that's a concern that you have with presaleing, then I have two recommendations. If you're new to making a product and you're concerned about presaleing, as long as you're acting in good faith, my two suggestions are, number one, make about a quarter of the product before you start selling it so that you can see, if I've done one quarter of the product, I can see how long it took me, I can see what it's like. If I can make 25% of this product I can make the other 75%. That gives you some safety against kind of this risk of catastrophic failure, if you will. The second thing is, if for some reason that still happens, if you still can't deliver, well, then give people refunds and don't spend the money that you're making on selling your product until you've finished the product. I think this is really not something that we have to be concerned with. As long as we are willing to do the right thing, as long as we're willing to act ethically, then I don't see this as a problem at all.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, I want to get deeper in to this because, like I said, I'm really interested in the topic of ethics. Let's have a quick interim summary from the examples we've looked at so far. My point is, I think it's important to ask the right questions and to look at the right things because looking at these things like countdown timers, prerecorded webinars, presaleing a product, looking at these things and trying to make a judgment of, is this ethical or unethical? That's kind of the gut reaction. We feel bad about something maybe and we try to say, "Well, this is unethical. It ought not be done." But the point is that we're looking at the wrong things because a business can do all of these things and be ethical or a business can do none of these things and be unethical.

Shane Melaugh:
In fact, let's go through a hypothetical example of just that because I think the actual levers of what makes something ethical or unethical in marketing and in business lie elsewhere. Let's take two example businesses. We have the photo gear business. Okay? Business one is photo gear business and what they do is, their product is a device that you add to your camera and it's made for professional photographers. This device adds a bunch of advanced features to your camera, maybe like advanced time lapse features or motion detection features so you can set it up and photograph wildlife when something walks by and whatever, advanced stuff for professional photographers. Let's say that this piece of hardware is very expensive. Maybe it costs $500, $1,000, $2,000, whatever. Camera Gear can be very expensive.

Shane Melaugh:
Let's say it costs $1,000 and this product does exactly what it says. You buy this product, you give this company $1,000, they ship you this thing, you attach it to your camera, it comes with an app, and it does what it says. It gives you the features that were advertised. Let's say this company does a lot of stuff that is potentially annoying. You go to their website and immediately there's an interrupting light box where they try to get you to sign up for something. Maybe you can get an app for free that has some functions that are useful for photographers and when you get it, it always tries to upsell you to this expensive device they have. On their email list they hammer you with emails all the time. They run webinars that are prerecorded webinars. There's countdown timers everywhere. They do all this stuff we talked about.

Shane Melaugh:
The do all this stuff. They push hard on their marketing, but you can opt out and you can choose not to buy the thing. You can uninstall the app. You can leave and it's no problem. like I said, if you buy the thing, you get exactly what you were sold. This is an example of an ethical business. I don't think that any form of pushy marketing makes this unethical because they have this product, they're pushing hard to get the right people to buy it, and more on that in a bit, and it's fine.

Shane Melaugh:
Example two is the Forever Slim Company. Okay? Forever Slim Company. They sell a miracle weight loss pill. All right? In terms of marketing, it's very simple. They only have a sales page and on their sales page, they don't have interruptive pop-ups, they don't have countdown timers, they don't have fake webinars, they don't have anything like that. All they have is sales copy that makes anyone who reads it feel like they're worthless as a person unless they lose weight and makes them feel like everything else doesn't work. "You've tried exercise, it doesn't work. You've tried diets, doesn't work. This doesn't work and you're a piece of shit if you don't lose weight."

Shane Melaugh:
"The only solution is this pill. We sell the weight-loss pill. You take this pill, it solves all your problems. You'll lose weight, you'll be worthy as a person once again. You'll be attractive," and so on and so forth. It also costs a lot of money and of course, it doesn't work. Of course, it doesn't work. You get a bunch of pills that have either inactive ingredients or maybe some ingredients that potentially do some harm because it wasn't properly tested and this business, like I said, they don't do any of the annoying marketing stuff, all they do is, they sell a product in bad faith that doesn't work, they take people's money, they make it very, very different, near impossible, to get a refund, and they target people who are essentially victims. They poke the wounds of those people. They basically target desperate people. They poke the wounds of those people and they get as much money as they can. This is an unethical business.

Shane Melaugh:
The reason I'm contrasting these two businesses is again, to just highlight that the technicalities of whether there is pop-ups on the website, whether there's a prerecorded webinar, and so on, it just doesn't matter. That's not what makes the big difference when it comes to, how much good does this do and how much harm does this do because our Camera Gear company, on the whole they're ethically relatively neutral leaning towards positive because they don't do any real harm and they deliver a bunch of features for professional photographers which maybe gives them some enjoyment, makes it easier for them to do their job. It brings something positive. On the whole, they do some good. They don't do dramatically good. It's not like making the world a better place, but they do some good and they do almost no harm. That's ethical.

Shane Melaugh:
Whereas the Forever Slim Company is targeting people who are victims, making them feel more like victims, taking their money. Basically, making them feel bad, that's doing harm. Taking their money, that's doing harm. Making it impossible for them to get their money back, that's doing harm. They're not doing any good. That's what matters. That is what matters when it comes to that question of ethical marketing. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, obviously scams are unethical. Scams are the ultimate acting in bad faith. But another thing that I think is very important for marketing is, who's your target market? Because the thing is, if you have our Camera Gear example, they are targeting professional photographers and really, they can only target professional photographers.

Shane Melaugh:
It's the nature of their business. They can't go and go to the average person who is not a photographer and try to sell them this thing. No matter how hard they push, if you don't even own a DSLR or a professional-level camera, then you can't use this device. Naturally, their entire target market is going to be people who this product is useful for and who already spend probably thousands on Camera Gear. The buying power is also there. They're selling an expensive product to people who are in the habit of buying expensive products. Professional photographers, they use their gear to make their money, so it's basically a business investment. Because their product delivers on the promise, there's no problem there.

Shane Melaugh:
The question of the target market is very important because unfortunately there is often a lot of money to be made by targeting desperate victims. You get people, think of it, the more desperate someone is, the more you can kind of victimize them in marketing. This is all something you are probably familiar with if you study copywriting and marketing, is that you want to be familiar with, what are the pain points and the frustrations of people in your target market and you essentially want to amplify that pain. All right? You want to understand, what is it, what are the problems that plague people in my target market, and you want to remind them of those problems and that primes someone to buy something as a solution because in my everyday going around I might not be thinking about this problem right now, but if I see your marketing that reminds me of that problem, reminds me how annoyed I am about this, that makes me ready to buy a solution.

Shane Melaugh:
You can do this. Basically, the more pain someone's already suffering, the more desperate someone is, the more of a victim someone is, the more you can push those buttons to put people in a desperate situation where they're like, "Anything. I'll do anything to solve this horrible problem." You can amplify their problem for them. You can make that problem worse and then sell them a solution that isn't a real solution. Unfortunately, a lot of consumerism, a lot of marketing, essentially functions like that. Interestingly, we like to look at a seedy, make money with four times trading, type of sales page and say this is the example of unethical marketing. This is bad, and it is, it is bad, but the most mainstream kind of advertising works exactly like that. The most mainstream stuff that we see everywhere basically makes you fee like crap for various things. Your life is not as good. You're not slim enough. You're not attractive enough. You're not rich enough. You're not successful enough and so on, shows you examples of people who are younger and fitter and better looking and happier than you and associates a product with it, often unrelated.

Shane Melaugh:
It's like, oh, you see a bunch of people having fun and then it's an ad for a mobile phone company. Like, what? But that's what they're doing. Basically, they're creating a problem, they're making people feel inadequate and they're saying, "Hey, this hole in your heart, you can fill it with my product." Unfortunately, that is a common way to do marketing and I think that is often with mainstream stuff, the more mainstream something is, the more likely it's doing something like that and the more niche a product is, the more specific a product is, kind of a micro-business, very rarely does anything like that. That's also one of the reasons why I think this kind of business, you make a niche online course that teaches something useful, that's a great business. If you kind of widen the scope and you go, like I said, with weight loss, you make people feel miserable about their weight and then you sell them some solution that's not a real solution, that goes into unethical territory quite quickly.

Shane Melaugh:
That's one of the questions I would ask that I think matters. Who are you targeting? Are you targeting victims? And also, how much are you charging, how pricey is your product compared to the buying power of people in your target market because that's another thing. It's one thing to sell an expensive product to people who have money to spend. It's another thing to kind of squeeze someone who's desperate for their last penny. Again, that's often the case. Often the worst offenders, they work like that. They go after desperate people's money. Encourage them, typical MLM type thing, encourage people to go in debt to get in with a promise of making it up later and stuff like that. That's horrible. The question is, who are you targeting?

Shane Melaugh:
Another thing is, that I often think is totally overlooked is, are you participating in the problem by default. There are things that are problematic, but normal. There are things that are unethical, but everybody does them. As an example, I think that most social media use is clearly being shown to do more harm than good. There's been various studies to show that people are less socially connected, ironically. Spend less time in real-life interactions or are more likely to be depressed and suicidal and so on, the more they use social media.

Shane Melaugh:
I'm not going to go into great detail on this. I'll link to some sources in the show notes if you want to do further reading or if that sounds suspicious to you, but the idea is that basically, the more people use social media, the worse off they are and if you're participating in this problem, if you are participating in the thing of trying to post pictures of yourself that make your life look amazing and kind of curate the, "Oh, my god. Look at how happy I am and how great everything is," to get more likes and whatever, if you're participating in that, even though it's completely normal, that's unethical. You're taking part in one of the problems that is plaguing our society.

Shane Melaugh:
I know that this is probably going to trigger a lot of people that I just said that because it's all well and good to talk about some scammy weight-loss pill thing. We can all feel superior. Feel, "Well, I wouldn't do that." But that's the thing, we have a blind spot for things that are normal. But if you're participating in something, another thing is rampant consumption where we have the ecological footprint of people who are relatively well off in developed countries is a catastrophe. When we are participating in the problem of the destruction of our environment and that's unethical, but it's normal. Everybody does it, so nevermind.

Shane Melaugh:
This is another thing I wanted to point out because often, this is the sharks versus cows problem. The thing that looks scary, the shark looks scary and it attacks you and there's blood and stuff. It's terrible. That's what we're afraid of. That's a gut response. It doesn't mean that that's the thing that we should be afraid of. Rationally, we also shouldn't be afraid of cows because cows kill almost no one, just like sharks kill almost no one. We should be afraid of hamburgers. Hamburgers and deep-fried food because that actually kills so many people very slowly without blood. It's not scary. It doesn't stalk you at night. It doesn't hunt you down. But the food we eat kills a lot of people but we're not scared of it because it doesn't look scary. It's the sharks versus hamburgers problem that we also have when we look at the four times trading product or the whatever product on a scammy-looking sales page.

Shane Melaugh:
That's what gets us going, but then if I start pointing out, maybe hamburgers and social media are the problem, now I've made everyone my enemy because we like to point at other people and say, "That's unethical." Nobody wants people to point at us and say we're unethical. This is also one of the reasons why I don't like the misuse of a word like ethics, kind of to vent about things that annoy you, because I think ethics, it's an important topic and it's a very unpleasant topic, for most of us, a very unpleasant topic. It's very difficult to live in our world and be ethical because the default is not ethical.

Shane Melaugh:
And talking about this, there's another problem that I think is also a sharks versus hamburgers problem, which is that certain topics and certain industries just automatically seem more suspicious and are just more likely to attract people's ire. Anything that is related to making money online, that automatically seems like, oh, really? That seems fishy. Of course, this is something that I notice a lot because the products I sell are always kind of related, not always, but often, kind of related to this. I make sure never to frame a product as kind of an easy making money opportunity. But still, I sell marketing software. It's supposed to increase conversions on your website. It's supposed to make you more money, and that automatically is kind of suspect. It's automatically, is that a scam? Because of course there's a lot of, it's very easy to scam people I think. "Oh, you'll make so much money. Just give me some money and then you'll make so much money." That is a common scam. That's an industry, anything related to business opportunities, making money, this kind of thing, is automatically kind of suspicious and feels a bit scammy.

Shane Melaugh:
But then, if we look at all the criteria we've looked at, let's say you buy my course. My most recent course costs a few hundred dollars and is, yes, supposed to help you build a business that generates income, so right away it's like, hold on, is this a scam? But then we have something like college degrees and what is that? Unfortunately, in increasing numbers of countries in the world people are getting into debt to get college degrees. America is the worst example of this where people get horribly indebted in order to get a college degree, and why? What's the reason given? Well, it is to make money, essentially. Get this degree so you can get a better career, you can make money, and give us all this money to get the degree because you'll make more money afterwards.

Shane Melaugh:
But what's the reality? There's so many people walking out of universities with degrees with no useful skills at all and they've been scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they're saddled with this crippling debt and they've had their years stolen from them. They've had several years stolen from them for something, the economic value of which is dwindling rapidly and for something where, even if they start in a job, they have to basically learn from scratch because they didn't learn any actual practical skills.

Shane Melaugh:
Now, that, if we think in the frame that I laid out here, even if you buy my course for a few hundred dollars and even if it's not that great, how much harm did that do because it took very little time and it took a relatively small amount of money. How much harm does that do versus a college degree that steals several years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars and does nothing for you? But basically, nobody bats an eye at society at large pushing college degrees on people because that's just accepted kind of as a social norm. It's fine. No questions asked. But in terms of the ethicacy, in terms of the financial damage it does, in terms of the opportunity cost, it's ethically far worse, it's ethically far worse what a lot of colleges are doing.

Shane Melaugh:
It's not to say that I'm obviously not against education. I'm all for good education and I think it very much depends where you get a degree and what degree you get, but I've seen this myself. I know people who have marketing degrees and it's just shocking to me how little practical ... I've met several people with marketing degrees where I was really shocked at how little practical skill they had in doing marketing. In other words, they have to learn marketing strategy if they actually want to work there. And the cost of that, that comes at such a huge cost that's absolutely insane. That is far more of an ethical issue, in my opinion, than someone selling a make money online course.

Shane Melaugh:
But once again, it really depends on, again, how much harm does it do, how much good does it do, and are you acting in good faith, and by that, let's go into what I think, if we bring this back to just online marketing, I've kind of taken a very broad view here, but if we bring it back to, okay, you have an online business, you're doing marketing for your business, you're concerned about what is ethical marketing, what are ethical business practices here? Here's what is to me are like the keys of doing this right.

Shane Melaugh:
Number one, make a good product. Base your business around a good product. That's the main thing. Anything where you're trying to wiggle out of that, anything where you're trying to get around that, is more dubious. If the core of your business is, "I have a product that solves a certain problem, that basically does what it says on the tin, and I'm selling that," that clears so many problems out of the way and it puts you in that situation where it's like, yeah, whether you put pop-ups on your site, whether you have countdowns, whatever, you sell a good product that does what it says. Number one basis for ethical marketing.

Shane Melaugh:
Number two, act in good faith. Don't deceive people. Don't pretend like you want to do something good for your customers when really you just want to steal their money and get away with it. Act in good faith. Number three, don't target victims. I think the best way to do that is to target a very narrow, very clearly defined niche of people who can ... Try to appeal to exactly the right person who can make use of your product and don't target victims. If you follow these three points, if you follow these three keys to ethical marketing, then all the stuff, upsells and click bait and fake webinars and so on, all the stuff that people get annoyed with in marketing, are not really an ethical problem. That doesn't make them good practice. Personally I don't do most of those things. I do some of them, but I don't do most of them because I just don't want to do that kind of thing. But, like I said, I wouldn't call it unethical to do them.

Shane Melaugh:
So there you go. The three keys, create a good product, act in good faith, and don't target victims with your marketing. All right, I've been rambling on about this. I would really love to hear your thoughts on this. I'd really love to hear your questions about this and your take on this and what makes something ethical or unethical and even if you disagree with what I said and, in fact, especially if you disagree with what I said, I'd really like to hear from you. Now, you can go and leave a comment, you can interact, by going to activegrowth.com/ethical. That's activegrowth, one word, .com/ethical. You can leave a voice message there, you can ask questions or leave your comment there, or you can just write the comment in the comment space. I will also link to basically everything I mentioned, everything related to this episode, there. Thank you for listening in. This has been the Active Growth podcast. I'm Shane Melaugh and I'll see you next time.