Every marketer must recognise they have moral choices to make

It is always sobering to ponder how future generations will judge ours. What will be their equivalents of our incredulity at the past’s acceptance of slavery, colonialism and homophobia?

Not that you need to scale up to these ubiquitous moral heights to play the mental game. We can also seek to imagine what the young citizens of tomorrow will make of our professional endeavours in our little domain of marketing today.

“How could you even think about promoting an airline, with the climate crisis in plain sight?”

“So, you made high street fashions all glamourous and affordable without thinking about the environmental impact. Shame on you!”

“You mean, you advertised fast food to gullible kids, with a childhood obesity epidemic in full swing? How could you live with yourself?”

The literally honest answer – “I had a salary to earn, a bonus to clinch and you guys to educate” – isn’t likely to swing it. But neither are the much more reasonable answers that things were a lot more nuanced at the time, and you stayed strictly within the prevailing legislative framework.

Marketers can lose sight of the big moral picture as their gaze is drawn ever more minutely down into the legal pixels.

Those two marketing realities – nuance and legislation – will be weighing on marketers right now in the sprawling food and drink category, as the ‘less healthy foods’ (LHF) legislation comes into force from the start of next year.

The issue it seeks to help resolve is clear enough: there is, indeed, an obesity epidemic, and it is distressingly prevalent in children, with 27% of our nation’s kids classified as either overweight or obese. The new legislation will ban television advertising of LHFs before nine o’clock, and take online advertising off the table completely. That way, the theory goes, kids are less likely to clamour for all the wrong things in their lunchboxes or at the kitchen table.

So much for the spirit of the law. It’s when you delve into the letter that the nuance – baroque complexity might be a better term – becomes apparent. And you’ll forgive me if I drill into that detail now, because I think it helps explain why marketers can lose sight of the big moral picture as their gaze is drawn ever more minutely down into the legal pixels.

An unhealthy confusion

The complexity starts with the definition of ‘less healthy food’. To make it into the LHF sin bin, a product must first fit into one of 13 widely divergent food and beverage subcategories, ranging from pizzas and ready meals to confectionery and soft drinks.

From then on it’s a scoring game, with bad points gained for calories, fats, sugars and salts over prescribed maximums. But you get to earn good points for beating minimums for protein and fibre, and for the inclusion of vegetables, fruit and nuts.

The good points are your route to redemption. Subtract them from your bad points and if you have a score under the magic number, you avoid the ignominy of LHF status. Except it’s not that straightforward, because if your bad points total is high enough, there are extra rules and calculus loops that make redemption way less likely.

There are other nuances that seem to make no sense. Radio advertising is completely exempt from the legislation. This is either good news for the commercial radio industry, as it gets to sweep up all the budget that would have gone to digital or TV. Or it’s a total indictment of the medium as not persuasive enough to bother trifling with.

Young people face ‘widespread exposure’ to junk food marketing online

Weirdly, the law does not apply at all if the product comes from a business employing fewer than 250 people – as though a chocolate and treacle muffin with 249 dedicated employees behind it is a whole lot healthier than one lovingly crafted by a team of 251.

What’s most urgently exercising the minds of marketers in the sector, as the legislation enters a voluntary phase next month, is the confusion over the status of ‘brand’ advertising – the promotion of the brand itself, rather than any identifiable products. It was OK. Then it wasn’t. And is now up for negotiation. Though that could have changed again by the time you read this.

If the confluence of a societal issue like obesity and the quest for growth within a powerful sector such as food puts marketers in a moral maze, the presence of legislation that is, itself, a kind of maze is apt to become part of the problem.

Here’s where it leads. Huge marketing resources get devoted to, first, comprehending the legislation and its byways, then assessing the brand’s products against it, then doing the same for competitors, then wargaming their probable moves, then trying to work out how to keep the portfolio afloat while staying the right side of the rules.

That can in turn lead to worthy outcomes – genuine innovation to put healthy nutrition above all else. But it can also, and with greater likelihood, lead to making product tweaks to get to the desired number in the LHF scorecard. Some brands are working on low-sugar options, for example, which usually means more processing and more ingredients with names like sorbitol, xylitol, aspartame and acesulfame K. You solve one problem, but create another.

Seeking the moral high ground

The moral dilemmas facing the food and beverage sector happen to be topical right now, which is why I focus on them here. But whether we like it or not, to be a marketer today is to be obliged to navigate your own moral maze, no matter which sector you work in.

If the category is beauty, the moral issue is the impact of raising unrealistic expectations of natural life changes such as ageing.

If it’s automotive, it’s about the deleterious environmental effects of mass energy consumption.

If it’s technology, it’s about the ethics of exploiting personal data.

If it’s healthcare, it’s the danger of overmedication and potential addiction.

If it’s financial services, one issue among many is how the institution chooses to invest customer deposits without their knowing.

Even charity is not exempt. There is a question mark over the guilt-inducing raising of funds from well-meaning people who may be struggling to get by in inflationary times.

Capitalism doesn’t have a blameless record of choosing the right path when the guardrails are absent.

From this moral vantage point, the similarities with the food and beverage situation loom larger than the differences.

For each of these sectors there will be a regulatory framework – and there needs to be, because capitalism doesn’t have a blameless record of choosing the right path when the guardrails are absent. And again, those regulatory constraints will be nuanced – with their exceptions, provisos and special cases – because they’d never have made it past the committee stage if not.

And marketers can choose to go two ways. They can play the game of maximising gain while staying close to the letter of the regulatory diktat. Or they can raise their sights to the societal issues and work backwards from there.

That may mean putting a line through profitable but questionable endeavours in today’s marketplace and lobbying for funds to innovate for the greater good tomorrow. In which case, conversations between marketers and the board are going to get way more tortuous and tense.

But on the upside, when the time comes – though I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it – conversations with the next generation just might become a little less shaming.