To start, I don’t think this author has the answers: his approach to selling is still manipulative, it’s merely more subtle. I don’t think he’s an evil man, just a bit half-witted in that he wants to avoid being manipulative but lacks sufficient knowledge of rhetoric and psychology to do so entirely. You cannot, in any way, toy with peoples’ vulnerabilities and psychological tendencies to subvert their rational faculty with the aim of getting them to do what you want and then claim not to be manipulative.
What’s more, I don’t think he’s alone in this. I regularly witness people who attempt to manipulate me, or to manipulate others in my presence – and it happens so often that I find I am no longer as offended as I should be at their lack of ethics, but instead take offense of their lack of subtlety. The clumsy and ham-handed mannerisms add insult to injury, suggesting “I think you’re too stupid to realize how I am attempting to manipulate you.”
But it then begs the question as to how guilty I am of the very same practice. I would like to ask “whether I am guilty” rather than “how guilty I am” but I can’t go that far. Through intent or negligence, I sense that everyone is manipulative to some degree, and living in a society in which you have to deal with people who stubbornly refuse to do the right thing, it is inevitable that you have to get your hands greasy sometimes, hopefully for the right reasons.
And in the end, that is likely the standard by which morality is judged: not what was done, but the reasons for which it was done. That’s part of the reason that sales is such a greasy business – it’s all about making money for yourself and your company by influencing other people into purchasing certain products. So it’s likely that a salesman or marketer can justly claim to be ethical if the products they sell to their customers render a value to them that is worth the cost.
This in turn drags me back to a couple of pet peeves. First, if profit is a reward for service, then profit is ethical. Those who seek to earn a profit without providing equal or greater value are clearly on the wrong side of the road. Second, that those who take a long-term perspective tend to be more ethical than those who take a short-term perspective. There’s good money to be made in tricking someone once into buying something that’s not worth the cost, but there aren’t many people who can be tricked a second time.
I do have a sense that the present age of communication will help to move firms in the right direction: when people could only tell a few others about the incident in which they were deceived by an unethical salesman, it was easy enough for salesmen to find fresh suckers who are unaware of their character – but in the present age in which people can more broadly share their experiences, good and bad, then consumers have the ability to find out more about the firms that approach them, and an unethical business cannot long sustain itself.
Said another way, ethics are no longer disposable – if ever they were – in selling and marketing products, especially in the online channel. And it’s for that reason that I sense that Jolles’s approach, while far better than the traditional “tricks” of salesmen, still needs a great deal of refinement.
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