Page 195 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Ethical Issues of Social Marketing and Persuasion 187

behavioral tracking of children under 13 years of age is regulated through
the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires parental per-
mission and disclosure of how the information will be used when it is
collected from children under 13. Social marketers certainly have an ethi-
cal obligation to permit consumers to opt out of data collection, secure
their permission before collecting data, inform them of the uses of the data
in clear and understandable terms, and protect their identities when they
permit their data to be collected.
Marketing has the potential both to pollute the natural environment
(e.g., discarded packaging, outdoor media) and clutter the airwaves and
electronic media. One would certainly expect social marketers to be good
stewards of natural resources, just as they are expected to be good stew-
ards of other resources. Because their budgets are substantially lower than
those of commercial marketers, social marketers have not been criticized
for advertising clutter in the mass media in the same way that commercial
marketers have been. However, the costs of social marketing through elec-
tronic media are much lower than through most other media, so the po-
tential of social marketers to create excessive electronic advertising clutter
or spam is more probable now than ever. Taste and decency in messages
have been considered environmental issues in advertising, and social mar-
keters should be attuned to these issues as well. For example, some family
planning social marketing programs in developing nations have been criti-
cized for not respecting religious and cultural traditions (Smith, 2001).
marketing has unintended consequences. Scholars from various dis-
ciplines have drawn attention to and lamented marketing’s unintended
consequences and social byproducts (Pollay, 1986). Although there are a
myriad of criticisms related to marketing’s unintended consequences, one
criticism that pertains specifically to social marketers is that of creating
and/or reinforcing problematic stereotypes. It is often easy to create or
perpetuate a stereotype of people affected by a social problem while at-
tempting to motivate others to avoid it.
For example, a Georgia anti-obesity campaign targeted parents who
were not taking their children’s weight problems seriously (Kiff, 2012). A
recent study had shown that 75 percent of parents with obese children did
not realize that their children were obese, and that 50 percent of parents
did not know that childhood obesity was a problem—in Georgia, where
nearly 40 percent of children are overweight or obese (Gray, 2012). The
ads portrayed close-up, black-and-white photos of unattractive, sad-look-
ing, obese children with headlines such as “WARNING: It’s hard to be a
little girl when you are not little,” and “WARNING: Fat prevention begins
at home and in the buffet line.”