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Ethical Marketing From the Eyes of Ethical Marketers (part 1)
By Kimberly Bock | June 18, 2008
On our quest to find out what ethical marketing really is, I thought I’d include others analogies of ethical marketing and what it means to them. This is part 1 of the “Ethical Marketing From the Eyes of Ethical Marketers” series.
To begin with, I’ve asked Jonathon Colman of The Nature Conservancy.
Brief overview of The Nature Conservancy:
Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy works in more than 30 countries, including all 50 United States, with an increasingly global reach. The Conservancy has over one million members, has protected more than 69,000 square kilometers (17 million acres) in the United States and more than 473,000 square kilometers (117 million acres) internationally.
The Nature Conservancy rated as one of the most trusted national organizations in Harris Interactive polls in 2007, 2006 , and 2005 poll. Forbes magazine rated The Nature Conservancy’s fundraising efficiency at 88% in its 2005 survey of the largest U.S. charities. The Conservancy received a four-star rating from Charity Navigator in 2005 and was named by the organization that year on their list of “10 of the Best Charities Everyone’s Heard Of.”
1. Who are you?
I’m Jonathon D. Colman, the associate director of digital marketing for The Nature Conservancy. You can get to know me better by following me on Twitter.
2. What do you do?
I lead the strategic marketing and promotion of the Conservancy’s web site — that means all things search engine marketing, display ads, content partnerships, social networks, link-baiting, link-begging, web analytics, web application development, and a hundred other buzzwords.
3. In your opinion, what is ethical marketing?
As marketers, we have a choice to make when we use our skills to promote ideas, brands, and stories… we can use our powers of persuasion and attraction for Good or for Ill. I think the best sort of marketing is that which engages an audience without spamming them, without misrepresenting the truth, without baiting-and-switching, and with full disclosure. For example, I list myself as being a web marketer on all of my social network profiles.
To me, ethical marketing also means social change for social good. Or, in other words, it’s not how you tell the story, but the story itself. The environment and conservation means a lot to me and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to work in this area for the past seven years. But that’s just me — maybe you feel strong about international development, poverty, corporate social responsibility, education, politics, or another topic that deals with improving society. That’s great! Now let’s see you use the web to promote your cause — not at any cost, but simply to obtain the best leads that you can to create change.
4. In your opinion, does unethical marketing affect us negatively? if so, how?
In my opinion, unethical marketers create confusion, frustration, backlashes against their own causes (and others) by distorting the truth. It’s truly “marketing at any cost”. Surely this doesn’t help out society, let alone develop prospects and leads for the future.
5. How important is ethical marketing to you?
Very — I depend on it to promote The Nature Conservancy and our conservation work in all 50 U.S. states and 33 countries around the world. I think that all marketers need to work in such an open, accountable manner not only to be ethical, but to truly get better results.
–jdc
Many thanks to Jonathons hard work and ethics. He watches our backs every day by protecting the resources that we need to ensure quality of life.
If you’d like to find Jonathon in your social networks, some of those places are:
- FriendFeed
- FriendFeed Environment Room
- del.icio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Furl
- Mixx
- ma.gnolia
- YouTube
- YouTube - Nature Conservancy Channel
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Topics: Ethical Marketing |
June 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
[...] You can read more here. [...]
June 21st, 2008 at 10:21 am
[...] Ethical Marketing From the Eyes of Ethical Marketers W/ Jonathon Colman [...]
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
interesting article. i admire your thoughts on marketing… its not just about marketing itself but considers the environment and society as a whole
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Thanks for sharing your ideas on ethical marketing. I also can sense the advantages between environment and at the same time, earning profits.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
with a bit of redirection, marketers with a past history of unethical marketing strategies can always change. if their skills are of worth, then they should be able to smoothly adapt to those sorts of changes.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
[...] Ethical Marketing From the Eyes of Ethical Marketers (part 1) [...]