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Integrity in marketing
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Integrity in marketing

Marketing integrity is not just a virtue; it is a driver of choice. The main role of a marketing agency is to find ways to increase brand loyalty and customer sales for any given company, but a false advertisement could lead to a loss for the company.

In today’s society where fake news is everywhere, customers will stick with companies based on integrity and loyalty. Unless it is a last resort, no client will stick with a company that has lied to him or her. Yet, numerous companies have been known to be misleading in their marketing efforts.

In 2006, more than 75% of Opinion Research respondents said they preferred to buy from a company that operates ethically, even if they have to pay more. Yet how can an agency use expert writers to promote itself or provide clients with integrity? By taking a step back and analyzing their practice with these simple steps, a company can raise their loyalty and sales:

  • Prepare ahead by informing yourself, your staff, and your clients of the importance of integrity in marketing.
  • Look for evidence that integrity is important to a writer before you hire them, and emphasize that it’s important to you as well.
  • Give the writer only facts you can prove.
  • When reviewing a writer’s work, make sure that everything they say is true. A good writer will know how to phrase truth creatively, so the message is interesting as well.
  • When you find a good writer, commend them and keep going back to them with future assignments.

In his book, John Blumberg acknowledges that a great leader will take risks in not knowing and will be grounded with a core set of values, “we don’t go running away from our values, we go drifting away. And one day we wake-up in a place we never meant to be drifting in a direction we would never have chosen.”

The greatest loss of a company is the missed marketing of an unleashed set of core values. Customers base their choices on a guaranteed product. The false advertisement could lead to problems such as government agencies that have reportedly fined the pharmaceutical industry in excess of $3 billion in the past few years because of allegedly misleading marketing and sales practices. 

According to the adage, “A leading medical-device company admitted not long ago to failing to inform doctors about a potentially fatal flaw in their aggressively marketed heart defibrillators. The company’s stock price plummeted and the firm was eventually sold and rebranded”.

This could cause potential harm to the consumer but will cause more harm for the company. Integrity marketing is based on values that companies should abide by, yet not all feel that morals matter with business.

Real-Time Marketing and your audience
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Real-Time Marketing and your audience

With technology changing daily, consumers’ need for immediacy has become an expectation. Communicating with your clients through social media isn’t just a leg up, it’s a necessity to keeping your company ahead of the game. Although real-time marketing has been around for a few years, its appeal kicked into top gear during 2016 with multiple social media companies introducing real-time sharing to their sites. These new features offer businesses a cheap and distinctive way to communicate with customers and deliver content of value.

What is real-time marketing?

Real-time marketing is a strategy that focuses on adapting content to fit with current events or timely topics. Before the recent influx of live video features, real-time marketing showed itself mostly through memes or Instagram photos. Now, you’ll see it more regularly through Facebook Live webinars or Instagram stories.

Why use real-time marketing?

Real-time marketing ultimately allows you to humanize your brand. It creates an organic feel to communicating with your clientele. Customers are seeing your brand advertised on the same medium that they see pictures of their niece or videos of an old friend on vacation. This unique aspect of real-time marketing creates an authenticity that you won’t get elsewhere.

How does real-time marketing work?

Real-time marketing primarily works through social media. It allows your company to respond to events or topics related to your product immediately. Although this doesn’t mean that it needs to be a lengthy blog post. Something as simple as sharing a photo can offer an authentic contribution to the conversation that creates a bond between the company and its customer. For example, when the power went out during the 2013 Superbowl, Oreo responded with a Twitter post: “Power out? No problem.” The attached image was just one oreo, spotlighted, with the tagline “You can still dunk in the dark.” The clever post received over 15,000 retweets.

Within the last year, Facebook and Instagram both introduced real-time sharing features, and more and more companies are taking advantage of this platform. In addition to helping build relationships with customers, using real-time marketing creates a sense of urgency, encouraging consumers to act immediately. Many major brands have benefited from this strategy. Marc Jacobs, for example, introduced its 2017 fashion line via live video streaming. Fortunately, you don’t need high-tech equipment or an endless budget to utilize this strategy. Social media alone can help you use real-time marketing to build company-client relationships and provide unique, diverse content.

Virtual Reality: Life within a Screen
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Virtual Reality: Life within a Screen

Virtual reality (VR) is a new, exciting technology to be explored. Only a few years ago, it seemed to be something straight out of science fiction; its roots can be traced into film history of the 1950s. The ‘Sensorama’, invented in 1956, presented short films in specially outfitted movie theaters with corresponding sounds and smells. Its creator, Morton Heilig, used this early VR technology to further immerse the viewer into a storyline.

Though no vocabulary existed for the technology until 30 years after this cinematic appeal to the senses, today Heilig is recognized as the “father of virtual reality”.

Modern virtual reality is experienced by its user through a wearable screen. It encodes head, eye, and motion tracking and conveys them onto an LCD display. This makes it possible to transform 2D images into 3D environments. By manipulating the senses, the user accepts the “reality” presented to them.

With no separation between your sight and the ‘world’ in front of you, virtual reality allows for a deeper submersion than does augmented reality.

The VR boom in the late 1980s was too short-lived to make real strides. Silicon Valley’s VPL invested heavily in the new technology only to declare bankruptcy a few years later. After the market failure of several VR systems in the 90s, interest in its development was lost until very recently.

In the last decade, virtual reality has been sought after by innovators as being the latest in computing technology. According to Palmer Luckey, it is the “final platform”.

Luckey founded Oculus VR, which sold to Facebook for $2.3 billion in 2014. As an authority in the industry, he has a definite understanding of the limitless applications of VR.

As its original backers hoped, VR is already advancing the fields of education, science, exploration and career training. It has also been implemented in treatments for lazy eye and PTSD. VPL’s original founder, Jaron Lanier has made the modest comment that virtual reality is merely the “next logical step” in human innovation.

Following Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, Mark Zuckerberg took to his personal page to write: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected…we can start focusing on what platforms will come next.” Zuckerberg added that “Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream…The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together.”