Ethical Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Responsible communication
I’m glad you’re here! Because this means you want to find out how to incorporate ethical marketing into your business and resonate with a conscious audience.
“Ethical” and “sustainable” are common buzz-words used in the marketing world – in fact they’re pretty much wherever you look! But what does ethical marketing mean? How can you employ it positively in your marketing strategy? And how can you use it to grow your business or cause? I’ll cover all this and more in this article.
Contents
What is ethical marketing?
What are the benefits of ethical marketing?
What is ethical marketing not?
How to measure ethical marketing’s impact
Marketing for a conscious audience
How to put an ethical marketing strategy in place
Ethical marketing FAQs
What is ethical marketing?
Ethical marketing is the communication of products, services or concepts in an honest, transparent and inclusive way. This type of marketing has positive-impact at its core while also making sure the messaging is convincing and powerful. It also encapsulates sustainable marketing which is similar but has more of a focus on planetary health.
Why is ethical marketing different from traditional marketing?
As you can imagine, ethical marketing has more of a social and environmental focus than traditional marketing. Traditional marketing is often about sales and growth whereas ethical marketing’s focus is much wider and considers the wellness of the planet and everything that lives on it, as well as profit. Let’s touch upon this further with the people, planet, profit model below:
People, planet, profit in marketing
While “people, planet, profit” is often adopted by positive-impact businesses when forming their business model, it can also be applied to marketing. As an ethical marketer, you can use this model to make sure that your strategies not only create profit and conversions, but genuinely have the wellbeing of people and the planet at their core.
When using the people, planet, profit model, you must look at both internal and external factors of your marketing to make sure you create a well rounded ethical marketing strategy. Let’s break this down below:
External ethical marketing
This external focus on ethical marketing is what the customer will see. It’s where you put across your brand values and create ethically conscious and convincing content to appeal to your audience.
Some examples of external ethical marketing would be:
Being truthful and accurate when promoting your product
Using inclusive language and imagery
Appealing to a conscious audience with relatable and informative content
Giving detailed information about your company's ethics such as an impact report
Including real people with lived experiences in your storytelling
Internal ethical marketing
Internal ethical marketing is the behind the scenes stuff – but is equally as important! It’s more in the day-to-day such as:
Low waste marketing efforts
Limiting the use of AI
Hiring diversely in your marketing team
Using ethical suppliers and partnerships
Continuous learning and fact checking
Hiring a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) consultant
Getting feedback from communities and individuals affected by the issues you are aiming to solve
Tracking ethical marketing impact metrics
What are the benefits of ethical marketing?
Besides the obvious of using your influence for good **winky face**, ethical marketing can resonate strongly with a conscious audience – which I guess is the whole point of marketing right? Marketing your business in a transparent and responsible way to an ethical audience creates trust, community and advocacy. I’ll cover more on marketing to conscious customers further down.
What is ethical marketing not?
To further answer the question of “what is ethical marketing?”, let’s address some common mis-conceptions. Ethical marketing is not:
A path to ethics-washing and greenwashing
Ethical marketing and sustainable marketing often have connotations of ethics-washing and greenwashing and doing more harm than good. This is because “ethical” marketing is often put in place by companies who aren’t ethical at heart. Ethical marketing can only be achieved by businesses and causes who want to create a positive impact.
An alternative to corporate responsibility
Another common misconception is that ethical or sustainable marketing can be blurred into the territory of sustainable business consulting. However, while they can work together, these two things are separate and require different specialisations.
Ineffective
Marketing can truly shape the world as we know it. As a reverse of ethical marketing, we can see how cigarette companies and women’s razor companies shaped trends to the extreme in the early 20th-century and we are still seeing the consequences today.
On the more positive side, we can now see the mass awareness of climate change that has erupted over the last 10-20 years. Marketing is everything. It forms cultures and lifestyles and, if you do it well, you can use your marketing to change the world for the better. For example, Patagonia are paving the way by normalising buying quality products and repairing them, as opposed to the fast fashion mentality of low-quality disposable fashion.
How to measure ethical marketing’s impact
With ethical marketing, it goes further than tracking metrics such as traffic, conversion rates, follows and engagement (although these can be for sure still part of your strategy).
It’s also important to have an impact measurement reporting strategy. Here you must liaise with the company you are marketing for to find out their impact goals and align them with your marketing. It may then be as simple as tracking how many people signed your petition, or more complicated such as reporting on the mental wellbeing of the people in a certain location.
Marketing for a conscious audience
If you’re a sustainable/ ethical brand, tapping into a conscious audience is the most important thing that will make or break your business. An ethically conscious audience is tired of greenwashing – all they want is transparency and to trust a company that aligns with their values. Once you’ve mastered this, you’ll create a community of loyal customers that return again and again and even advocate for your brand.
In fact, while sustainable products are often seen as a luxury, a 2024 survey by PwC found that “Consumers are willing to spend an average of 9.7% more on sustainably produced or sourced goods, even as cost-of-living and inflationary concerns weigh.”
This shows that, when ethical marketing empowers a conscious audience, it’s a key tool for your business. However, when done badly e.g. your business values aren’t aligned with your “ethical” marketing, be prepared for greenwashing accusations and a loss of trust with customers.
How to put an ethical marketing strategy in place
Hopefully the above shed some light on ethical marketing dos and don’ts. Now, are you ready to start ethical marketing like a pro? Make sure to put these points in place when creating your marketing strategy. There’s an abundance of ethical marketing practices, but some of my favourites include:
Educate your audience
Don’t just sell, be a resource! Letting your customers know you know what you’re talking about will build trust and engagement. People hate to be sold to, but if you provide value to the community and become a go-to-resource, people will listen to what you have to say. Just make sure to practice what you preach. Basically don’t be like Shell (well, don’t be like Shell anyway, but particularly in the following example):
Aannndd, don’t forget to…
Fact check
There’s a lot of noise and mis-information on the internet, so make sure to fact check anything from your own company’s information to more global topics you’re talking about. If in doubt, it’s best to talk about what you know.
Be mindful about growth
Capitalism pushes for growth for growth’s sake. While most of us have heard the phrase “if you’re not growing you’re dying”, with ethical marketing you must consider your growth more intentionally. You want to grow an instagram following? Great! But maybe consider why you want to do this. Would you rather a high-following by tapping into generic trends, or would you rather a loyal (perhaps smaller) community following with more intentional content creation?
Hire diversely
Do your best to hire a diverse marketing team with different perspectives and backgrounds. If relevant, hire diverse models and influencers and consider bringing in a DEI specialist. This will create a welcoming and empowering environment for your audience.
Also make sure to talk with people and communities with lived experiences about the issues you are raising, so you are fully informed and respectful to the topic.
Be aware of carbon emissions and waste
Perhaps the most obvious one, especially when it comes to sustainable marketing, is to be conscious of your marketing carbon emissions. The list is never ending, but some ways to reduce your emissions are: choose video calls over long-distance in-person meetings, or, when hosting in-person events, encourage public transport to get to the event. Use renewable electricity and serve vegan only food in both the office and at events. Also limit the brand merch – while it can be good for promotion, does it really need to be so excessive?
Be transparent
One thing I love to see is when a company admits they are still improving. Is there such a thing as a perfectly ethical company? Probably not. Of course a lot of businesses and organisations do much better than others, but the path to sustainability is never ending.
Don’t be afraid to highlight your improvement plans in your marketing. Perhaps you’re a sustainable clothing brand start-up and you’ve had to source some materials from another continent. Help your customers understand why this is and what your plan is to further reduce your emissions.
On the other hand, perhaps you’re a large company doing a big U-turn to become more ethical – you won’t be a sustainable company overnight, but reveal your plans, provide updates and let your audience get excited.
Of course, don’t be afraid to big yourself up too. Talk about your sustainable manufacturing process loud and proud, or provide updates on your community involvement. Perhaps you’re a black-female owned business – don’t hesitate to tell your story!
Make sure marketing values align with the rest of the business
As I’ve mentioned before, there’s no ethical marketing without an ethical business model. Louder for those in the back! If you or the company you’re working for has a bold new ethical marketing strategy but doesn’t have the receipts, let’s say the alarm bells should be ringing.
An example of this is Dove who create many campaigns about women’s empowerment and were celebrated for including women of colour in their ads… but then it was revealed that they produce high amounts of plastic waste which is shipped abroad and left to mostly women of colour to clean up. Female empowerment? I don’t think so.
Use buzzwords carefully
Your packaging is made from 50% recycled materials? Great! Just don’t then start to claim you’re a sustainable business. That’s giving **cough cough** greenwashing. While buzz-words are great to grab an audience’s attention and quickly put a message across, it’s important to use them to their truth and also explain in more detail what you mean.
Empower don’t guilt-trip
The world is pretty scary right now – the planet is getting hotter and people’s basic human rights are being taken away. People do care, but it can be a lot. If you’re a brand advocating for positive impactful change, to get people onboard you need to not overwhelm or scare them further. I’ve seen so many organizations spreading awareness of issues but without empowering people to make positive change.
Ethical Marketing FAQs
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In this fast paced world, it can be tempting to grow your audience as fast as possible and focus on short term metrics while cutting corners on ethical marketing practices. While general marketing metrics have a place, long-term advocacy and community building is key to tap into the ethical, sustainable market.
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Marketing can be both ethical or unethical, depending on who wields its magic. Marketing has a strong power to change cultural norms and values, and this can be used either for good or bad.
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