Does Behavioral Marketing (BM) Have A Social Responsibility?

Have you seen "Crash" a provocative and disturbing flick, produced in the last cycle? It's one of the more thought-provoking films to come out of Hollywood in some time. Though on the surface it has nothing to do with BM, if you look at it from a contrarian view, it very much raises the issue of BM's social responsibilty.

It begs us to ask ourselves just how much responsibility BM has in society? Other than established legal elements like the COPPA kid guidelines, is there a line we should not cross as it relates to targeting a person's personal "preferences?"

Behavioral marketing in fact doesn't try to change a person's view of things. Rather, it reinforces them. It says, "Hey, since you're "like this," this product or service will fit right into your lifestyle and view of things." Is there anything wrong with that? No, and yes.

To the more cynical amongst us, the word "preference" is just another word for bias, or prejudice. By its general definition, BM reflects the process of aiming messages that fit into consumers' views and actions relative to the people around them, their surroundings and themselves; essentially how they see the world. Prizm and other research companies have segmented mindsets based on geography among other things, which is premised on the "birds of a feather live together"; a clearly legitimate approach. To account planners, these issues are the tools of the trade. However, with the tracking of consumer behavior online, marketers can segment product interest by household or cubicle. The degree of target specificity has leapfrogged far ahead of its former pace vs. a generation ago.

In the film Jurassic Park, the mathematician challenged the group, including the blood-sucking lawyer of the-then invisible consequences unleashed by technology. He questioned if they really knew what they were doing and potential issues that were unknown or ignored based on profit-driving thoughts. We see it right now with various pharma companies in court and most recently especially with marketers capitalizing (we prefer exploiting Katrina).

No one should doubt that the account planner's role is not to judge, but to help sell. Crash's relevance to this topic is that they make a very convincing case that fear is a powerful motivator. The situations the characters find themselves in trigger certain emotions and/or behaviors that certain people would find intimidating and uncomfortable; though many marketers would find very appealing. Well, that's news NOT.

We see it everyday from crash test dummy ads to health-related cereals. In the last few years, when Firestone found itself well outside of automotive aftermarket content and into consumer news stories about how their allegedly faulty manufacturing process led to several automotive tragedies in warm weather climates, rather than sit on the sidelines and have some compassion for its competitor, every major other tire manufacturer ratcheted up their prime-time budgets, went on-air and in print and shouted about their safety.

Who knows if their products had real differences in the manufacturing process? They may not have, though to the consumer, who "had a lot riding on their tires," the tendency to have them make a tire-replacement decision was most likely at an all time high, especially if their "mag wheels" had Firestones. And who could blame them.

Marketing 101 and common sense (vs. Common Cause) tells us that if an advertiser can get their message in front the person when they are in a very distressed, concerned or vulnerable state of mind, no doubt they will more easily close the sale. The products and/or services that most obviously pop up as solutions in the film Crash would be health, home and business insurance, self-reliance-based children's educational books, automobiles, health food, data privacy and even liquid cleaners that remove magic marketer or spray paint.

Most disturbingly for us was the not-so-subtle message that having a gun at arms-reach might provide a better sense of security. Gun experts don't promote that statistics don't necessarily support this concept. In reality, the chances of an inexperienced gun owner hurting themselves and their loved ones are higher than you might imagine.

These days we see lots of AllState Insurance advertising on television, promoting various image-building elements and their concern for Katrina victims. One heart-strings tugging spot talks about how they purchased and gave away 10,000 little teddy bears for children affected by the hurricane. Forgive us for being cynical but perhaps our MadAve experience makes us see this as an incredibly pathedic and underhanded tactic to make us feel more warm and fuzzy in our recliners that AllState is more concerned about little kids than their next quarterly profit. We can't help but wonder if the campaign is to pre-empt more negative news about insurance companies among consumers, to protect their vs. shareholders.

Positioning a leading financial company in more emotional terms would be more believable if the message was that the budget for teddy came out of AllState's employees pockets. It doesn't. The talking head holds up the little teddy bear with a background that looks very much like Mississippi and rubs it in our face that its little things that also count. Is it an insurance company#s job to buy 10,000 (their #) …and spend millions patting themselves on the back instead of taking that money and giving it to people in need. Perhaps later, it would be appropriate to do a post-recovery campaign with testimonials from AllState customers who made passionate personal testimonials that they really were in good hands.

We could think of more than a few ways that AllState could have spent its million $$ primetime budget and the $35,000 or so they probably laid out for blue teddy (probably bought from China for $3.50 each vs. a US company we only assume) for other more productive purposes. We would be surprised if AllState had them inventoried back at the warehouse for such as purpose, though who know?

Can you imagine the genius who came up with that *brainstorm* idea at company headquarters, or was it from their agency? And can you guess what programming they ran the spots in?
1. Network Cable News
2. Network Cable News
3. Network Cable News
4. Jeopardy
5. All of the above

Another brilliant example on tone-deaf BM was GM's recnet announcement of their intention to fire 25,000 employees, ironically on the day (or thereabouts) of their latest "employee discount" promotion. Perhaps we got it wrong, maybe it was their "employee discounted" promotion.

Who knows, as this trend translates more into more product placement tactics, the idea of pop-ups in films may not be so far away. No offense to BM companies mentioned here, but is it just a matter of time when technology like Google's Gmail paid listings word tracking technology is applied to "blockbuster" films. Can you imagine Claria or WhenU sliders popping up in the theatre screen, or more likely on a person's individual home screen which is sensitive to plot analysis, or even the temperature highs and lows of the viewer, like treadmill exercise machines which helps you monitor your heart rate?

Will we soon see even more subtle messages woven into the plot, created, produced and analyzed to deliver the product message at the key time to enhance the product in such a way as to maximize sales conversion. Some might question if this threshold has already been crossed?

At the end of the day, each of the Crash's characters had to move off their initial preferences and into another, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse space. It revealed that as mere mortals we are only human and over time it becomes very clear to each of us what our preferences are individually and the people and effects of our surroundings. And sometimes, if we are going to survive, the pragmatic thing to do is to be somewhat more flexible. Our preferences after all could be the things that put us into harm's way than we would like to believe. Satisfying them could be lethal.

Last but not least, for those who took business 101 in school a discussion on social responsibility of business and BM wouldn't be complete if we didn't mention Milton Friedman's well-known thesis that the only social responsibility business has is to maximize profits for its shareholders. Some organizations of course do this better than others.

That's fine by us. It even applies to BM. When we see ad campaigns like the ones mentioned we believe that the company's responsibilities to their shareholders will indeed be maximized, though not necesarily in the right direction.

We don't portend to think that little things like our insurance policies mean much, though the teddy campaign absolutely had a real impact on us. If we were on the fence about choosing insurers, our mind is made up. With us they have definitely crashed and burned. We will never ever consider them again