All marketing is—fundamentally—persuasion, and can therefore take a number of rhetorical forms. A pessimistic reading might see marketing as manipulation, a kind of marketplace sophistry, utilizing any tool at hand to drive the consumer to purchase, and there is evidence that such Machiavellian craft has been deployed…take the tobacco industry as a worst-case example of a lengthy, deliberately sinister, tactic at work. Marketers, more and more, leverage psychological research—both academic and anecdotal—to devise effective communication strategies. With this greater understand of human motivations comes a greater necessity for careful and considered methodology. Simply using knowledge of human psychology and neurology to motivate behavior is not prima facie immoral, but certainly the more we understand and can predictably affect cognitive processes toward an intentional end, the more we need to articulate and implement an ethical approach to marketing.

We at white bicycle plan are working toward that ethical future. Join us, effective marketing does not have to be commercial.