I must say, things are looking good once again. There is door bell in our house, and we make sure that it is only when it rings, that we open the door for someone to come in. There are alarm clocks to wake us up just in case we sleep too long. This all may sound like an ideal scenario to brag about our immaculate life. But, being an optimistic person, I pray daily to god if somehow they can lend us a little intelligence to create alarms and bells in the business world too. The reason being, some of us are busy playing action reaction game in which dollars and rupees play a role of ace or joker. To sum all these thoughts together, I was referring to intrusion, with money in the driver’s seat. We are continuously being analysed, reviewed, classified into groups and tested by companies and in some cases companies might know our likes and dislikes better than our parents.
Are they trying to become our parents? Not really, but it is sure that they want to act like one- Guiding and overruling our choices and decisions. For instance, if you are a regular visitor to a small shop, the owner will know you very well and will guide you like a one year old. And needless to say, everyone likes that kind of hospitality. Your favourite social networking site suggests you friends and coincidentally you might know them all. If you are worried to get best fares from Delhi to Mumbai, it’s just only matter of seconds that you will see a popup saying- get best fare from Delhi to Mumbai and temptation will make us click that Advertisement. Now the big question is – How important are ethics in case of marketing research? The way a company conducts its market research these days have serious ethical repercussions impacting the lives of consumers. And the ease with which companies can gather data about its customers, surely leaves us thinking about the level of privacy invasion. A market research assumes that people are honest and truthful about their choices. But there has to be a level of honesty to ensure that they don’t blow cover of their own privacy. In a recent survey on ethical and methodological practices across three times periods- 1975-76, 1989-90, and 1996-97, the results revealed an increase in deceptive procedures over time reported in human participant studies, from 43% in 1975-76 to 56% in 1996-97, largely due to an overall rise in the use of active deception procedures. So, it becomes necessary to find a perfect balance of honesty and privacy while sharing opinions and ideas.
Privacy and confidentiality are important factors for a business to protect their intellectual property and secret business traits. And in most of them they have been given the status of law. But why a single person fails to take advantage of the same? Best reason according to me is that, they don’t feel insecure while sharing their opinion and they really don’t understand what information they should share with the world. As it might happen that you
are sharing a post online that says –hey I am going to become a mother or father. We might not be even aware, but it’s quite likely that you will start seeing Ads related to childcare. Moreover if we were hesitant enough, coffee shops and restaurants would never had introduced feedback forms asking their email id and numbers, which according to me, are not a part of research and unnecessary. Though still there are some examples which contradict this notion about people. For instance, a Beijing university sued Microsoft for providing a formal contract which had to be accepted to install windows xp.
It is imperative for us to know that if companies are not aware about their customers, then instant offers and discounts will become a distant dream. Marketing division of a company will be useless if they give discounts on product A when they are dealing with customers who like product B. Nowadays we have so many platforms to express ourselves, share our opinions and tell what is right and wrong. This has made marketing products much easier. More Customers are now satisfied with the products they are dealing with. According to a survey from Lab42, among those who like brands on facebook, 82% say facebook is a good place to interact with brands. 75% say they feel more connected to brands. 69% say they have liked a brand because a friend has done so.
It is interesting to see that promotional discounts and coupons are still connected to liking a brand online especially when it’s used to drive sales. And companies are intelligent enough to follow different strategies on different platforms. For example, on LinkedIn there will be more Ads on products/services requiring individual decisions and which are mostly B2B oriented. The only thing which a company can be held accountable for is how much customers rely on their brand and what level of moral relationship is present between them. Companies promoting and motivating morality in its marketing tactics is surely going to earn some respect by the employees as well as customers. It is hard for me to come to a conclusion immediately. I can only suggest that market researchers have obligation to collect data which truly reflects the needs of customers. If he has a one dimensional view, probability of harm to customers increases. Other than that, companies which have lot of data to play with, it becomes mandatory for them to lay down strict laws and regulations to restrict any kind of data sharing and requiring the accent of customers protecting the customer’s right to privacy. A customer should be entitled to opt out of the sharing if he doesn’t want to get involved. People should be aware of what they share with outside world, for example it is quite obvious for a family to trigger robbery just because they have posted online that they are going to be on a holiday. It needs to be kept in mind that, everyone has become quite intelligent and resource and data utilization is no more a challenge for most of the humans. Deceptive marketing is there to stay and it is only by our intelligence and level of awareness that we can protect our privacy
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