Stealth Marketing….be wary of it.

Consider this….  A seemingly perfect family moves into your neighborhood into a fabulous house…..they are a picture-perfect family, attractive and slim, with great teeth and apparent affection for one another. They wear the latest in fashions, drive the most stylish cars, and have the coolest new gadgets.

Soon everyone in town starts emulating them, which in actuality was always the objective. You then find out that the new neighbors are in-reality professional trendsetters, employees of a company whose clients pay that company to conspicuously consume their products.

The reason that the neighbor uses a certain new Smartphone and talking up its finer points to everyone around, is that the manufacturer has an arrangement with the neighbor’s employer for him to do exactly that.

The food the neighbor’s wife serves at a dinner party, the clothes their children wear to school, everything is a real-life product placement and the new stealth marketing technique called STEALTH MARKETING, and it sure is one scary technique and thought.

This is how easily the marketers and brand owners can manipulate our minds, desires, wants. It’s also the topic of a Hollywood movie I saw last night, The Joneses. It made me realize the impact marketing can have on consumers and how easily indeed their minds can be manipulated to suit the brand owner’s motives and perspectives.

To me, the boundaries of ethics is becoming seemingly vague in such times. It should be an everyday battle for brand owners to make sure ethical marketing is done and that proper morals are the fundamental checkpoints.