About AMA

Executive Summary
Marketing managers face increasing problems informing and persuading consumers about the value of the products or services they sell. Consumers are skeptical of business-provided sources of information as they mentally tune out sales messages in the increasing cluttered mass media landscape. In an effort both to bypass the consumer skepticism and to break out of the message clutter, many managers turn to hidden or disguised sales efforts that are not identified as sales messages to unwary consumers. For example, funded journalism or product placements give a false impression that the message is news-based product publicity. Efforts to generate word of mouth use paid buzz agents who provide “endorsements” by people who pretend that that are product users praising the marketing subject to strangers. Consumer protection advocates, consumer interest reporters, and public policy officials at regulatory agencies all have expressed concerns about these covert or hidden sales efforts that deceptively hide the messages’ selling intent. At some level, the public policy presumption is that companies would not be spending money to fund these efforts unless they possessed a pragmatic basis to know that these are effective sales tools. In reality, however, most covert marketing efforts have not been subjected to testing of their effects or effectiveness. They are often done because other companies are doing them. In the process, covert marketing creates additional commercial clutter that consumers ignore. As various covert marketing activities are repeatedly discovered by consumers as clumsy and limited sales messages, the companies are creating additional realms of consumer skepticism and limiting any persuasive power they might have originally possessed. The public policy issue of the hidden selling intent might be trivial as covert marketing becomes self-defeating.

Biography
Herbert Jack Rotfeld is Professor of Marketing at Auburn University and editor of Journal of Consumer Affairs. He received the American Academy of Advertising’s Outstanding Contribution to Research Award in 2000 and Kim Rotzoll Award for Advertising Ethics and Social Responsibility in 2006. A scholar of advertising regulation and self-regulation, he has also been noted for iconoclastic studies that assess the validity of conventional wisdom or other commonly held presumptions about business practices and consumer persuasion that are frequently repeated without question in many textbooks. He coined the term “misplaced marketing” in his book Adventures in Misplaced Marketing, and has published commentary in Marketing News and Journal of Consumer Marketing, discussing abuses, criticisms and, omissions of marketing practices. Some of his often-cited essays in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals have been translated or reprinted in various publications in both the United States and other countries.