• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I have had a love-hate relationship with marketing for a long time now. And I have to admit that lately the pendulum has swung a lot more to the hate side.

This may sound odd coming from someone who was a marketer for almost all of his professional life, from the time I graduated from college until I retired. That span was almost 40 years.

During that time, I always felt the art of marketing lived very much in an ethical grey zone. When someone asked me to define marketing, I usually said something like this: “Marketing is convincing people to buy something they want but probably don’t need.” And sometimes, marketing has to manufacture that “want” out of thin air.

When I switched from traditional to search marketing almost 30 years ago, it aligned better with my ethics.  With search marketing, consumers have already held up their hands and said they wanted something. They had already signaled their intent. All I had to do was create the connection between that intent and what my clients offered. It was all very rational; I wasn’t messing with anyone’s emotions.

But as the ways we can communicate digitally with prospects have exploded, including through the cesspool we call social media, I have seen marketing slip further and further into an ethical quagmire. Emotional manipulation, false claims, and games of bait-and-switch are now the norm rather than the exception in marketing.

Let me give you one example I’ve run into repeatedly. Airline bookings used to be handled by travel agents. But with online travel booking sites, travel search tools and direct booking with the airlines, the information asymmetry that had traditionally protected airline profit margins evaporated. Average fare prices plummeted, and airline profits suffered as a result.

Here in Canada, the two major airlines eventually responded to this threat by following the lead of European low-cost carriers, introducing an elaborate bait-and-switch scheme. “Ultra-basic” fares (the actual labels may vary) stripped away everything possible in the way of customer comfort from the logistical reality of getting one human body from point A to point B. There are no carry-on bag allowances, no seat selection, no flexibility in booking, and no hope of getting a refund or flight credit if your plans change. To add insult to injury, you’re also shuttled into the very last boarding group and squeezed into the most undesirable seats on the plane.

With these fares, the airlines did everything possible to let you know you are hanging on to the very bottom rung of their customer appreciation ladder.

Now, you may say that this is just another case of caveat emptor: It’s the buyer’s responsibility to know what they’re purchasing and set their expectations accordingly. These fares do give passengers the ability to book a bare-bones flight at a much lower cost. It’s just the airlines responding to a market need.

I might agree -- if it weren’t for how these fares are used by airline marketers.

Flight tracking tools track flight prices for future trips. These tools will send you an alert when fares change substantially in either direction. This kind of information puts a lot of power in the hands of the customer, but airlines like WestJet and Air Canada use their bare bones basic fares to game this system.

While it is possible on some tracking tools like Google Flights to set your preferences to exclude "basic” fares, most users stick to the default settings that would include these loss-leader offerings. They then get alerts with what seem to be great deals on flights.

The airlines know that by reducing the fares on a select few seats for a few days just enough to trigger an alert, they will get a rush of potential flyers waiting for the right time to book.

As soon as you come to the airline site to book, you see that while a few seats at the lowest basic fare are on sale, the prices on the economy seats that most of us book haven’t budged. In fact, it always seems these fares have gone up substantially. On one recent search, the next price level for an economy seat was three times as much as the advertised ultra-basic fare.

If you do happen to stick with booking the ultra-basic fare, you are asked multiple times if you’re sure you don’t want to upgrade. With one recent booking, I was asked no fewer than five times if I wanted to pay more before the purchase was complete.

This entire marketing approach feels uncomfortably close to gaslighting. Airline marketers have used every psychological trick in the book to lure you in and then convince you to spend much more than you originally intended.

And this didn’t happen by accident. Those marketers sat down in a meeting (actually, probably several meetings) and deliberately plotted out, point by point,  the best way to squeeze more money from their customers.

I know, because I’ve been in those meetings. And a lot of you reading now have been, too.

When I started marketing, the goal was to build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with customers. Today, much of what passes for marketing is like preying on a vulnerable prospect in an emotionally abusive relationship.

And I don’t love that.