Seth Godin wants us to pretend that if a company employs unethical marketing tactics that customers en masse will recognize it for what it is and turn against said company. Yes, if a customer gets an unsolicited email from a company that doesn’t fulfill its promises he and his friends will drop whatever it is that they normally do and take time out of their day to fight the bad marketer, blog up a storm, and hit the company in the pocket book. Such is the way of things in the platitudinous universe of Mr. Godin.

Back on Earth we have to live with a sad reality: for every one hundred people who get pissed off by bad marketing there’s one schmuck who ends up rewarding bad marketers with his patronage, and that money reaped from that one schmuck is enough to make up for the other one hundred dissatisfied folks. And thus the bad marketer has no real incentive to stop being a bad marketer, so long as there’s always that one schmuck who makes it worth their while.

“Bad marketing” is a phrase that I usually use with “incompetent marketing,” but in this instance I mean marketers who just don’t give a damn about the repercussions of their work.

The extent to which a “bad marketer” is bad is debatable; in some instances they merely invade your privacy, and in others they knowingly deceive you and try to sell you on promises that they have no intention of fulfilling. Really bad marketers, the ones who sell products that end up killing or hurting their customers, end up on the ten o’clock news and lose their customers. What about the bad marketers in between?

What about the social network that captures your email address and resells it over and over again without your permission? What about the SMS info service that violates the national Do Not Call list and spams you with messages? What about the local business that hires door-to-door solicitors who try to interrupt your daily life to get you to sign up for some crappy service? What about niche news sites who plagiarize content from unknown authors? How do customers fight them?

How Have You Fought Them?

Please post your answers here on how you’ve tried to fight bad marketers - it can be anything from writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper to just referring all of your friends to someone else. I look forward to reading your answers.

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