Deception In The Marketplace

The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self-Protection

David M. Boush, Marian Friestad, Peter Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136648687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

This is the first scholarly book to fully address the topics of the psychology of deceptive persuasion in the marketplace and consumer self-protection. Deception permeates the American marketplace. Deceptive marketing harms consumers' health, welfare and financial resources, reduces people's privacy and self-esteem, and ultimately undermines trust in society. Individual consumers must try to protect themselves from marketers' misleading communications by acquiring personal marketplace deception-protection skills that go beyond reliance on legal or regulatory protections. Understanding the psychology of deceptive persuasion and consumer self-protection should be a central goal for future consumer behavior research.

The authors explore these questions. What makes persuasive communications misleading and deceptive? How do marketing managers decide to prevent or practice deception in planning their campaigns? What skills must consumers acquire to effectively cope with marketers' deception tactics? What does research tell us about how people detect, neutralize and resist misleading persuasion attempts? What does research suggest about how to teach marketplace deception protection skills to adolescents and adults?

Chapters cover theoretical perspectives on deceptive persuasion; different types of deception tactics; how deception-minded marketers think; prior research on how people cope with deceptiveness; the nature of marketplace deception protection skills; how people develop deception protection skills in adolescence and adulthood; prior research on teaching consumers marketplace deception protection skills; and societal issues such as regulatory frontiers, societal trust, and consumer education practices.

This unique book is intended for scholars and researchers. It should be essential reading for upper level and graduate courses in consumer behavior, social psychology, communication, and marketing. Marketing practitioners and marketplace regulators will find it stimulating and authoritative, as will social scientists and educators who are concerned with consumer welfare.

1
Deception in the Marketplace

Deception pervades human social life. Practicing deceptive persuasion and coping with other people’s attempts to deceive you are fundamental social activities in every domain of daily life. In writing this book we will explore varied perspectives on deceptive persuasion. There are, of course, similarities across these domains regarding concepts of how deceptive persuasion is practiced, detected, and resisted. People may try optimistically to develop some broad general understanding about deceptive behaviors, which they hope they can apply across all social domains. They then will try to rely on these general beliefs, theories, and skills as they move from one social context to another. However, our goal in this book is to motivate more research on marketplace deception. Deception is one of the most important phenomena in the American marketplace. It is not solely a legal issue. Most marketing text books and writings on marketplace deception treat deception as a legal topic that is mainly of interest to corporate attorneys, judges, juries, and government regulators. However, in this book we will showcase it as a central problem of consumer behavior. As such, we propose that individual consumers must act on their own to protect themselves from marketers’ misleading and deceptive communications. They need to be self-reliant, and their first line of defense is their own self-protection skills. Individual consumers cannot rely on government policies and regulations, or the byzantine legal enforcement system, to protect them from being deceived. Therefore, the socio-psychological processes and socio-cultural factors that influence a consumer’s marketplace deception-protection knowledge and skills go well beyond reliance on legal or regulatory protections.

Deception protection skill is a critical life skill. So our first port of entry for studying deception in the marketplace is through the minds of individual consumers as they struggle to acquire practical deception-protection skills attuned to the modern marketplace. Deception protection is an important component of a person’s general self-efficacy, shaping their confidence to effectively handle the problems they confront in the major social domains of their life. Our second port of entry is a concern that the American marketplace has a cancer, and that cancer is deception. Deceptive marketing is pervasive, and deceptive marketing harms consumers. It harms their health and their welfare, their financial resources, their privacy, their self-esteem, and their trust in society. Deceptive marketing undermines fair competition, and it demeans the profession and practice of marketing.

So, because we believe consumers can learn to protect themselves from marketplace deceptions we arrive at our third port of entry, which is the opportunity and need for educational interventions that focus directly on teaching people deception-protection skills applicable to the marketplace. Our motivation for analyzing the social psychology of deception in the marketplace is not just intellectual curiosity about an under-researched topic. Rather, we see it as a vital step toward designing effective training programs for youngsters and adults that are based on research into how consumers learn (or do not learn) and how they can protect themselves from marketplace deception. In addition to a deeper understanding of how consumers cope with deception, we seek to examine how individual marketing managers think about whether or not to attempt deception. What makes a brand manager or advertising strategist decide to embed some form of deceptiveness into a marketing communication campaign? What leads other marketing managers to do their best to avoid misleading and deceiving consumers? We examine this for its inherent interest and because teaching consumers deception protection skills may require teaching them how deceptive marketers think.

Although marketplace deception engages the minds and arouses the passions of a wide spectrum of society—individual consumers, parents, social commentators, child advocates, educators, government regulators, legal scholars, consumer protection activists, marketing practitioners, media satirists and cartoonists—research on marketplace deception is scarce and out of balance with the importance of the topic in society. The legal perspective has guided most of the prior behavioral discussions of marketplace deception. For example, the groundbreaking books about marketplace deception by Ivan Preston (1975,1994) and Jef Richards (1990) drew on behavioral theories and measurement tools to help readers understand how Federal Trade Commission regulators and the courts can and do deal with deception. It is our position that much of the prior research on deceptive marketing was done with the goal of influencing public policy or legal practices, rather than with building sound theoretical understandings of the social psychology of consumer and marketer behavior regarding deception.

We hope to motivate scholars in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior, social psychology, communication, education, and sociology, to think much more about the important research questions related to the process, practice, perception, and prevention of deception in the marketplace. We also hope to motivate all those who study persuasion and social influence to refocus their research toward this complex and fascinating topic, and do more research on how to educate and motivate lay people to detect, control, and resist real-world deceptions. We want readers who have not thought much about deception in the marketplace to think more about it and to think differently about it. We want readers who have thought a lot about deception in general, and in social contexts other than the marketplace, to understand more about deception in the context of the twenty-first century marketplace. This book is written in the spirit of what is now being called “transformative” consumer research (Mick, 2006). Transformational consumer research is research aimed at helping consumers help themselves. Its goal is to transform the lives of consumers positively and to help serve consumer welfare interests more so than the interests of corporate marketing mangers. Doing such research will also transform the field of consumer research.

Deception in the Modern Marketplace

Deception is a central and inevitable part of marketplace interactions between marketers and consumers. Consumers and marketers engage in what is best thought of as adversarial cooperation. As long as marketplaces have existed, merchants, marketers, advertisers, salespeople, and con artists have tried to mislead and confuse the potential buyers of their products and services. In ancient Rome, Cathay, and Alexandria, merchants used misleading persuasion tactics that are still used in modern Hong Kong, Nairobi, Los Angeles, and the global community of the World Wide Web. In this contest of minds an atmosphere of suspicion, caveat emptor—buyer beware—has long been the prevailing rule of play. In today’s world, we can be even more pointed in our borrowing from ancient Latin: Caveat lictor—readers of marketing materials and corporate publications beware! Caveat spectator—viewers of television ads and marketplace visual representations beware! And because we now live in the cyber world—caveat “surfer”—Internet users beware!

In the early twenty-first century our everyday world has become super saturated with marketing persuasion attempts. Because so many of these attempts are potentially misleading, we spend our lives as consumers in constant self-protection marketplace-survival mode. U.S. Federal Trade Commission surveys show that consumer fraud in America victimizes almost twenty-five million people each year, which is over 10% of the entire population. And this is just the tip of the deception iceberg because it only includes detected and reported deceptions that are illegal. Children and adolescents grow up as the targets of marketers’ persuasion attempts, living what has been called a commercialized childhood in a persuasion nation. Adult consumers struggle throughout their lifespan to cope with an ever-changing array of misleading marketing techniques and tactics. These range in scope and sophistication from the well-planned multimedia marketing campaigns of large corporations to the modern versions of small-scale scams, con games, and swindles that have been with us for centuries. On the other side of the marketplace, managers and salespeople try to understand how various marketing activities may mislead, harm, or alienate customers and thereby damage company reputations and personal careers. They think about whether to intentionally, or through willful negligence, practice deceptive marketing. They sometimes think about how to intentionally do the very best they can to keep from deceiving consumers.

Marketers operate at a boundary between providing consumers with deceptions that the consumers will embrace and adore (entertainment, comedy, drama, story telling, visual effects) and avoiding deceptions that will harm consumers and competition. We propose that this borderline is an interesting area of behavior to consider from a research standpoint. Does this blurring of the lines between taboo deceptiveness and valued deceptiveness influence how marketers and consumers make those distinctions? How can consumers sort through all that and self-protect adequately? How does this blurring of lines affect individuals whose professions require them to move back and forth between creating valued deception experiences that consumers crave, and trying to avoid all deceptions that misdirect a person’s buying decisions?

We acknowledge that consumers often engage in deception-seeking behaviors such as devouring novels or attending movies and plays, and that deception is a vital aspect of art and entertainment. In this context consumers evaluate and enjoy the author’s skillful deception of the audience in the plot and characters, as well as the drama of the characters themselves who discuss and expose their interpersonal deceptions of one another. Through these experiences the audience learns about how deception is conceived and executed in a character’s mind and actions. The marketplace also provides the opportunity to purchase professional services in deception detection (e.g., police interrogators) or deceptive skills (e.g., attorneys, advertising professionals, doctors). In this context there may be difficult issues raised about the level and types of deceptions the buyer wants and does not want versus the provider’s views of how to provide the service effectively with or without using some deception. Providing these types of professional services could be thought of as akin to dramatic performances, in that there is tension and negotiation and possible misunderstanding and misalignment between what level and type of deceptions the buyer wants and needs versus those the provider believes are essential to successfully provide the service.

This book is focused on how consumers can detect, neutralize and resist the varied types of deception that face modern consumers on a daily basis. Examples of these include

1. Deceptions that are rooted in the careful choice of words and the construction of prose texts to imply things without stating them
2. The strategic digital alteration of photos, videos, and other visual representations
3. Misrepresentations via numerical information and calculations, statistical information, and research results
4. The artful omission, masking, camouflage, and obfuscation of information 5. Strategic uses of distraction and information overload
5. Using persuasion tactics that depend on deceptiveness to be effective, and using subverted persuasion tactics as accomplices to deception to decrease consumer caution and suspicion
6. Actions designed to build friendship and shared-interests relationships with customers
7. Displaying false emotions in sales and service delivery situations
8. Incomplete and misleading framings of comparisons, risk information and decision problems
9. Inadequate information search and product usage instructions
10. Brand mimicking and artful advertising confusion
11. Fabricated brand personalities and brand images
12. Disguising product placements in movies, television shows, and
13. Web sites
14. Disguising hired laypeople as everyday consumers to execute so-called ambush or guerilla marketing
15. Exaggeration, puffery, and marketing bullshit
16. Blatant outright lying about product attributes and usage consequences

The topic of marketplace deception is important because when people see deceptions and frauds everywhere, even in high-consequence markets such as health care, financial services, and housing, overall levels of societal mistrust may increase. Societal mistrust is further magnified when people perceive an imbalance between the limited skills and resources consumers have to protect themselves from being duped compared to the substantial resources and expertise of modern marketing organizations. We suspect that in the public mind, the perceived threat from marketplace fraud and deception is magnified by other societal happenings, such as the spectacle of lying and deception by national leaders and political candidates, and the dangers of personal privacy invasions opened up recently by the global Internet.

Misleading and Deceptive: Defining Marketplace Deception

The concepts of “deception” and “deceptive” are ambiguous, socio-culturally constructed notions. Conceptions of deception vary across cultures and across generations in a culture. We examine the definitions offered from the perspectives of the community of western academic researchers, the American legal community, and the professional deception planner. First, drawing on the research literatures of the social sciences, Masip, Garrrido, and Herrero (2004) thoroughly reviewed various definitions of deception. They proposed an integrative definition that describes deception as “the deliberate attempt, whether successful or not, to conceal, fabricate, and/or manipulate in any other way factual and/or emotional information, by verbal and/or nonverbal means, in order to create or maintain … [in someone] … a belief that the communicator … considers false” (p. 1487). This definition incorporates notions of a communicator’s intentionality and prior beliefs. We will elaborate on this definition in several ways to make it more relevant and applicable to real world marketplace deception.

First, the inclusion of the concepts of “intentional” and “deliberate” deceptiveness in general social sciences definitions are there to provide an exception for cases where people do inadvertent deception, deception out of ignorance, and deception due to the understandable inability to know, remember, and communicate “the truth” competently. In general discussions much is made of distinguishing inadvertent or unintentional deception from real deception, which requires a consciously intended attempt to deceive. Usually, this distinction is meant to excuse individuals who did not know that what they were saying, showing, or implying was actually false. So, for example, a child or adolescent who misremembers or misreports on something she did or witnessed is not, in this view, really doing deception. The key issue here is that sometimes people will act deceptively without intending to even though they have done the best they can to be nondeceptive. It is our position that no such excuses should apply for marketplace deceptions.

In marketplace communication, all deceptiveness is intentional. All marketing communications are consciously planned, designed, and executed by communication professionals. In our view, a marketer is always responsible for any actions or inactions that have a reasonable likelihood of misleading and deceiving consumers. Marketers have access to the resources and expertise necessary to fully educate themselves about the deceptive implications of their marketing activities. So, for marketers to do “the best they can” to be nondeceptive requires that they educate themselves so they are in a position to understand when and how their actions or omissions may mislead. By taking this step marketers can control their actions so as to avoid deceiving consumers, unless of course they want to deceive consumers.

Our second adaptation of the Masip group’s definition relates to the requirement that the belief being espoused is considered false by the communicator. We accept that in the realm of everyday deception by lay people, everyone cannot be expected to invest heavily in learning about the validity of their statements every time they utter something. However, in the marketplace, a better standard is that marketers should be held responsible if they even “suspect” that a belief they encourage consumers to hold is false, and that marketers should know if their representations are likely to create misunderstandings or inaccurate beliefs. The marketer, who has the resources, time, expertise, and responsibility to learn as much as possible about the validity of statements and about the way the overall presentation of those statements could mislead consumers, should be held accountable for deception that occurs through malevolence, negligence, recklessness, or carelessness.

Finally, in social science domains other than the marketplace, deception is typically defined so that it includes a wide range of inconsequential and benign communications which can be described as everyday, interpersonal “little lies” about one’s beliefs, feelings, or autobiography (Depaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton, & Cooper, 2003). For example, in two studies where participants kept careful diaries of their conversations, college students reported lying in approximately one out of every three of their social interactions, and people drawn from the larger community said they lied in one out of every five social interactions (DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, & Epstein, 1996). These lies were mainly self-presentational statements about individuals’ personal feelings, beliefs, achievements, past actions, future plans, and immediate whereabouts. In those studies, as in most of the research on lay people’s deceptiveness in everyday conversations, the definition of deception included misrepresenting a private internal state, for example someone saying that they felt fine when they really felt a little stressed or sickly, or that they like someone when they actually do not. Also, in everyday social life, lay communicators may be deceptive because they have unreliable communication competencies that result in “unprepared” deceptions. They do not elaborately construct, redesign, rehearse, and pretest these little deceptions, so message recipients may often be misled and deceived because the speaker simply cannot craft and deliver a clear, nondeceptive, relevant message. Thus, for everyday interpersonal exchanges, the layperson’s deceptions and communication incompetence may be confounded. However, it is our position that neither the claim that communicated misinformation is inconsequential nor that the communicator is incompetent applies to the marketplace where messages are professionally developed and delivered.

Legalistic Definitions

Deceptiveness in commercial speech, which includes all marketing communications, is defined and regulated more strictly than any other form of speech in America. Because of this, professional marketing organizations often have their own in-house or outside consulting legal staff and screening process to judge possible deceptions from a technical, legal standpoint. Beyond that, there are specialized legal consulting services that provide advice on how to interpret legal rules and precedents on deception. We suspect that many social scientists will be surprised at how broadly legal rules on deception are construed. Indeed, the legal viewpoint is more all encompassing and stricter in assignment of responsibility than the viewpoint on lying behavior that is found in most social science research. This is because marketplace deceptions are often serious and consequential to both consumers and to fair competition in general. The various definitions of marketplace deception that have been proposed within the American legal system reflect different purposes. One such purpose is regulation to protect consumers, making the legal defi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• The Authors
• 1 Deception in the Marketplace
• 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deceptive Persuasion
• 3 Marketplace Deception Tactics I
• 4 Marketplace Deception Tactics II
• 5 How Deception-Minded Marketers Think
• 6 How People Cope With Deceptiveness: Prior Research
• 7 Marketplace Deception Protection Skills
• 8 Developing Deception Protection Skills in Adolescence and Adulthood
• 9 Teaching Marketplace Deception Protection Skills: Prior Research
• 10 Societal Perspectives: Regulatory Frontiers, Societal Trust and Deception Protection Education
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index