Is Your Customers' Experience Designed Ethically?

For me, privacy is a huge issue and the reason why I wrote Brandwashed back in the day is because I was and still am very concerned about it for many reasons. First of all, I’m a consumer so I don’t want to be cheated in a bad way. So one of the things I wanted to do was to write a book where I’m raising the concern – not just to the consumer but also to the marketers – because it’s so easy to be grabbed by the trends and basically just run for whatever solution you have because that’s the order given from management, and soon you forget about that you’ve broken all sorts of ethical rules. 

I want everyone to step up and become a guardian for ethics. Why? Because at the end of the day if you are messing up with ethics and if you’re caught, then you’ll destroy your brand forever. And really the end goal should be to have a permanent life-long brand. 

So ethics for me are really important. I think the issue here is that a lot of companies are either ticking the boxes but really not believing it, or they’re maybe ticking the boxes but they’re not utilizing that opportunity the right way. I would, if I was a company, do an internal survey with all the customers and clients you have, figure out what ethics is for your customer base and then design the ethical guidelines around it – rather than just going down and picking some off-the-shelf solution, because if the customers and consumers are aware of that you really care about it and you’re designing your whole program around it, that really would also feel that you are more than just organizations that are trying to earn money. 

So, ethics for me is important, and I really wold urge you a lot to think about this right now because once you’ve burned your fingers it really is too late.