I stumbled across a video showcasing new smartphone, the Nokia’s Lumia 800 in their “Blown Away” campaign. The advertisement consisted of a challenge between Nokia promoters using the Lumia 800 and regular people using their non-Nokia phones. In this video, the challenge was to see which phone could upload a photo to Facebook in the shortest amount of time. Undoubtedly, the Lumia 800 had won the challenge and beat out what is shown to be an iPhone. In other words, the competitors phone had just been “Blown Away” by the Lumia.
It can be argued that the campaign is an unethical one because there is a slight element of deception. The Nokia Lumia is shown to upload photos flawlessly to Facebook, while the competitor phone seems to have latency issues at certain points. Why is this deceptive? Because the competitor’s phone, held by the challenger, may be filled with data such as photos, videos, and applications, while the Nokia phone is brand new. Of course there will be discrepancy in processing speed between a phone with less memory left, rather than one with lots of memory.
Another point found in the article is interesting because it was related to Utilitarianism and how it is ethical to maximize everyone’s utility. By launching this campaign, Nokia and Nokia users will be increasing their utility by having their phones win against their rivals’ phones. However, their rivals and their respective user base will have a decrease in utility because of how this campaign would affect their views. Ultimately, the user base for competitor phones is much larger than the Nokia user base, therefore decreasing overall utility, hence it would be unethical to run this campaign with respect to Utilitarianism.
Read more and watch the video here!
