Ethical Marketing

In our modern society today, again I am about to mention that the landscape for businesses have become so much competitive. People are creating new ways everyday to differentiate their products from the others. Above the functions and benefits of a product, the experiential aspect has only began to emerge since the turn of the new century and we have seen some great examples.

One example of a business that lives and breathes by its ethical marketing principles is TOMS, the American based One for One shoe company. Its ethos is simple; with every pair of shoes purchased, they give a new pair of shoes to a child in need.

Lately I have been struggling to connect the dots as to how ethical marketing could be connected to the consumers by explaining how ethical marketing could involve the consumer to make an impact. My initial thoughts were as blank as to only claiming that my brand is ethical and is friendly to the environment, but how could I go beyond that?

We all know that there are children around the world that are suffer, especially children. In the case of TOMS, by communicating the health benefits that children and adults alike will gain from having the soles of their feet covered by using UNICEF's data—Every year, nearly 10 million children under the age of 5 die from largely preventable causes. This statement in turn goes a long way to imply that users can literally save a life of someone by preventing a deadly infection due to the cause of having nothing to protect their feet.

To summarize, it is important to understand user's values (most importantly the one that touches the heart), then using numbers (through research) would only mean something to them!