Christine Zhang's Blog

After browsing through a couple of my classmate’s blogs, I stumbled upon Rose Koo’s  blog post titled “Marketing Wars”. I learned that Facebook had hired a private PR agency to spread false stories about Google in order to harm the company’s image, harm the opening of Google+ as well as market its own company’s image. She mentioned that this method was “unethical” and that if the story was a lie, the truth would eventually appear.

This got me thinking on my take on marketing ethics.

In terms of the marketing attack by Facebook on Google+, I think that what Facebook did was unethical, but it was smart. The only problem that they faced was that Facebook could have made it so that they would not have been found out (if that’s possible). I really believe that the world of business is not supposed to be based on ethics or the truth, but about whichever company is smart enough to create a truth and market it to their consumers.

In her blog, Rose gave a number of examples about products that were marketed ethically, even though there were commercials which showed the company’s product as better than their competitors (ex. tide vs. leading competitor). I wanted to focus on something that was marketed that didn’t necessarily have to be a product.

This brought me to think about the one comparative commercial that I’ve always believed to be not only unethical, but counter-productive in what the marketing group wants to achieve. Instead of gathering support, I felt as if the marketing team was taking away supports.

This is just one of the many attack adds that appear around the time of voting! Ironically, I think all these adds just make the individual’s adds weaker!

I thought that this video response was very intelligent! The Green Party is essentially creating another attack add, but they do it in a manner that is witty and reaches out to the people.