Earlier this month, we posted
an article on Smashing Magazine on using the "Seven Deadly Sins" to your own advantage in web design. Our argument garnered a mixed reaction - some readers found the concept novel and intriguing, while others railed against encouraging consumerist, "me" generation culture.
So which is it? Are we encouraging startups to market their products in innovative ways, or taking advantage of people's baser instincts for ill-gotten gains? Where do we draw the line between savvy marketing and dishonesty? What's "fair" in the world of web design and marketing?
First, we have to look at whether the behavior we're encouraging is really all that wrong to begin with.
Just how sinful is that sin?
The implication of the phrase "deadly sin" is certainly rather negative, but just how bad are these sins really? Would we eradicate them all from this world if we could?
Arguments against the "seven deadly sins" article assume the only legitimate decision is one based on cold calculation. Sure, maybe we'll make some life decisions based on lists of pros and cons, a set of tech specs, or spreadsheets of numbers.
But how often is that really the case? Whether we're falling in love or buying a gadget, our decisions often come down to visceral, gut reactions. We may try to legitimize them
ex post facto with eloquent arguments and cold reasoning, but that doesn't change our true motivation.
In a perfect world, maybe none of us would care about products or services or entertainment that wasn't strictly necessary to survive, but for many of us, those little things are what make life worth living.
Appealing to the seven "sins" isn't about taking advantage of people or encouraging bad behavior: it's about appealing to their human qualities in a way that cold numbers can't.
What not to do
To answer our own rhetorical title, we don't believe that anything goes. There are plenty of examples of companies out there going too far - profiting off of users' desire for a good deal, altruism, or unfamiliarity with the web. So what do we think is going too far? Well, unfortunately the world is rife with them, but we have a few examples, most notable for how high-profile they are (and coming from entities that many people assume they can trust).
It ain't easy being green
Environmental impact of the products we buy is a topic people are reasonably concerned with, and its high visibility has led to a predictable an onslaught of products claiming to be "green," which, unlike "organic" or "grass-fed" has no legal definition: so companies can get away with marketing their run-of-the-mill product as "green" (and charging more for it). One shaving cream company even tried
marketing their environmentally-friendly lack of chlorofluorocarbons - a compound that's been illegal since 1978.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Word of mouth is everything when it comes to many products, whether virtual or actual. Review-centric sites like Amazon and Yelp, as well as search engines like Google, help propagate user opinions, whether good or bad, in record time.
Recently, an unscrupulous web retailer, DecorMyEyes, took the old adage about bad publicity
to the extreme: taking advantage of the nature of Google's Page Rank, they realized the the worse they treated their customers (up to and including actual death threats), the more web chatter they'd generate, the higher they'd appear in Google's search results - where unsuspecting shoppers would take their high ranking as endorsement by Google, and start the cycle all over again. Google has since tweaked their algorithm to try to compensate for that negative publicity, but it's certainly more of an art than a science.
Questionable endorsements aren't limited to the internet, however: movie production studios, including Sony, have come under fire for dreaming up
imaginary critics to give glowing endorsements of their films: one such nonexistent review praised Rob Schneider's comedy The Animal as "another winner!"
Something rotten in the state of online games
As the popularity of simple, online social games has boomed, Facebook has struggled to maintain an appropriate level of control over game developers' tactics, particularly Mafia Wars and -Ville producer Zynga, who makes
one third of their massive revenue off third-party offers.
These offers ranged from legitimate Netflix trials to shady "IQ Test!"
scams that continuously bill the user via their mobile subscription (no credit card required). This issue came to a head last year, when user outcry garnered enough attention to get many of the
offers pulled.
It's a jungle out there
So, there's plenty of both good and bad advertising out there, and it can be difficult for consumers to spot the differences. But we sit on the other side of the fence, working on putting our products out there (hopefully with our best food forward). So where do we draw the line? Here's a few rules of thumb we like to keep in mind:
- Don't mislead the customer or falsely portray your product
- Don't do anything that would make the customer feel betrayed if they found out about it
It comes down to this: we design for people, and people aren't robots. People love products that appeal to emotion or "baser" instincts. But don't mislead people. That would be defeating the purpose, after all.
