Where is the ethical line in marketing between hooking a customer and getting them hooked?
Media is an open door to the public mind, Edward Bernays wrote in his landmark 1947 essay “The Engineering of Consent.”
“Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens,” he wrote. “The United States has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times.”
Seventy years later, the door to the public mind is wide open. The thousands of whispers have been multiplied by billions into a deafening roar of smartphones and social media. Consumers can stay in touch with the people and brands they love, meeting new ones along the way. In turn, marketers are now privy to consumer data they dared not dream could exist even 15 years ago—what consumers’ preferences are, how much they weigh, what sexual acts they prefer and the contents of their contact list. Marketers can reach consumers in their home, at work, in the car and anywhere they happen to take their devices—which, for many, is everywhere. As technology has made communication easy and life convenient, it has placed a two-by-five-inch glowing screen at the center of both.
U.S. teenagers spend nine hours per day using media devices for enjoyment, Common Sense Media reports, which adds up to more than 136 days of the year—not even including media time spent on homework or school. Globally, the average adult spends two hours per day on social media networks, Social Media Week reports, up from 15 minutes per day in 2012. Even if this latter number remained static, that would mean a lifetime average of five years and four months on social media—a number surely higher in the U.S., where 77% of people own a smartphone and 69% use some form of social media.
In this ecosystem, demand for a new kind of rehabilitation has emerged. Facilities, such as reSTART Life in Washington state and Paradigm Malibu in California, have popped up across the country to treat social media and technology addiction in children and adults.
Addictive qualities aside, social media could not thrive if it wasn’t so uniquely—for lack of a better word—social. Humans are social animals who ache for connection with others. Mauricio Delgado, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, explained to Marketing News in 2014 that social media activity—likes, retweets, comments—activates the brain’s reward center in the same way as a hug, smile or compliment. Social media interactions are positive reinforcement, he says, bringing favorable effects and drawing users back again and again.
Ashlee Humphreys, associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and author of Social Media: Enduring Principles, says users are hooked on this social feedback, longing for the dopamine high it creates. “We are always looking for how the social environment is responding to what we do,” Humphreys says. “Social media—let’s just say even more concretely the smartphone you carry around with you—allows you to get that social feedback, interact socially and put out social feedback 24/7.”
Humphreys cites an argument from Barry Wellman, sociologist and director of the NetLab Network, who says humans are now “networked individuals.” This means people actively seek online social capital, but physical group settings—such as bowling leagues—have become less common. An example of network individualism at work is someone posting for emotional support on Facebook when a loved one is sick; those friends who respond may not be lifelong friends, but they may give an on-demand bandage for an emotional wound.
Social media seems to walk the line between a way to socialize, an annoying habit and an addiction. Marketers may play an ethical role in ensuring consumers don’t cross the line from habit to addiction. To find the ethical line, we must first look at how social media can adversely affect people.
The Dark Side
It would be fallacious to say social media or smartphones are a net negative for society, as many studies have shown the power and positivity of human connection on these platforms. However, as Aristotle said in The Nicomachean Ethics: “Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice.”
The vice of social media can be shown in recent studies, including:
James Roberts, a professor of marketing at Baylor University who has spent much of his career looking at the “dark side” of consumer behavior, says the most concrete example of technology’s addictive qualities is the willingness of many to risk their lives by using a device while driving. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than eight people are killed and 1,161 are injured each day from an accident involving a driver distracted by screens. For scale, this is just less than one-third of the number of people killed or injured from accidents involving alcohol.
Aside from physical safety, Roberts says people risk their own relationships by “phubbing”—phone snubbing—which entails paying attention to a device in the middle of an interaction with a romantic partner. In one of Roberts’ studies, 70% of people say phubbing hurts their ability to interact with their partner. This seems to follow people into the workplace, as Roberts says a study currently underway by his team is finding “phubbing” can also harm employer-employee relationships and job status.
“When you perceive your partner to be spending more time and paying more attention to their phone, that undermines your relationship satisfaction, so you are less happy,” Roberts says. “And if you are less happy, you are more likely to report higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety.”
The internet is set up to be addictive, Roberts says. Companies want consumers to be clicking from page to page, to be interrupted and distracted. That’s what keeps the proverbial cash register ringing. “The internet has been created by people much smarter than me with the sole purpose of keeping you moving and keeping you off balance,” he says. “You’re always being interrupted. You’re clicking and you’re making more money for the advertisers.”
At the center of the social-digital movement are brands profiting from the internet’s addictive structure. Products by brands such as Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google are almost irresistibly entertaining on their own. Then, factor in brand-sponsored commentary, games, videos, posts, contests, images, virtual-reality simulations, notifications and messages—all optimized by personalized consumer data—and you have something far more transfixing than any TV show or movie. But does this level of consumer absorption make the product addictive or simply a habit? That may depend on how one defines the terms “addiction” and “habit.”
Nir Eyal, an entrepreneur and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, says a habit—which can be good or bad—is an action performed with little or no conscious thought. Addiction, on the other hand, is always bad and defined by Eyal as a persistent and compulsive dependency that actively harms the user. Similarly, Roberts sees behavioral addiction as any action a person continues to perform despite negative consequences. Where they differ shows their biggest disagreement: Eyal believes only a small percentage—2% to 5%—of the population is hooked, while Roberts believes the number is anywhere between 50% and 66% of U.S. citizens. Researchers from the aforementioned study in Disability & Trauma believe anywhere from 0.7% to 11% of the population is addicted to technology.
A matter for marketers, then, is what role brands are playing in the increased consumption of social media. Are brands simply practicing good marketing or are they taking advantage of their advanced knowledge of what makes the average human brain tick? Could the virtue of good marketing—which as Aristotle noted lies in power—turn into a vice?
original source
https://www.ama.org/publications/MarketingNews/Pages/marketings-ethical-line-between-social-media-habit-addiction.aspx
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