Otiumberg Ethical Marketing Policy
Last revised August 2023.
Why Ethical Marketing?
In line with achieving B-Corp certification, we aim to ensure that Otiumberg operates as ethically as possible in every aspect of our business, and this includes our approach to marketing.
We believe that all marketing efforts should provide genuine value to the target audience in order to earn their attention and their trust. Our strategies are based on a foundational belief that marketing should be honest and that marketers should not take advantage of anyone’s personal data.
Our policy statement below lays out the ethical marketing practices we follow at Otiumberg and the commitments we have made to ensure that our marketing activity meets or exceeds the highest ethical standards of our industry.
We Commit to Honesty in Marketing
As ethical marketers we commit to absolute honesty in our marketing for our own campaigns and for customers and partner driven projects.
We pledge to:
- Never use dishonest marketing tactics for our marketing campaigns, including:
- False advertising: exaggerating values and benefits of our products
- Post fake reviews or testimonials
- Never withhold negative information or data from the public solely to protect our image
- Only use words that are realistic descriptors of our products
Ongoing Project-Based Reflections
It is easy to claim that our efforts are honest, however it takes discipline and at times internal conflict to ensure honesty in marketing. We ask ourselves the following questions during campaign strategy and execution:
- Are we clearly communicating our product’s value without exaggerating or misleading our audience?
- Are we using language that honestly communicates the features and benefits of our products?
- Are we accurately quoting our customers and press when we share reviews or testimonials?
- Is our use of data and examples honest and accurate when promoting our features, benefits, or the impact of our products?
We Commit to Rejecting Impact Washing
As a responsible brand this is a point of particular relevance. Impact washing is similar to greenwashing and happens when a business exaggerates their positive impact to gain a marketing advantage or uses “feel good” marketing to cover up or distract from negative outcomes that their core business model is having in other areas–socially or environmentally.
Impact washing is a broad topic that includes:
- Exaggerating impact by inflating numbers, cherry-picking data, or focusing on stories that aren’t representative of overall outcomes;
- Communicating false promises or making unrealistic claims about expected results;
- Sharing stories or creating impact initiatives that aren’t rooted in an authentic mission or intention for good–but purely for the marketing benefits;
- Using a social impact initiative to distract from negative social or environmental problems caused by their core processes, products, or services.
We pledge that our campaigns:
- Are fully honest and transparent about the social and environmental impacts of our company.
- We will always strive to own our failures and mistakes
- Review marketing and communications strategies and tactics to ensure that they are not engaging in impact-washing.
We Commit to Cultural Sensitivity in Campaign Creative
Many marketing campaigns and messages have the potential to be insensitive. It takes a combination of self awareness and inclusion of others in the creative process to avoid marketing campaigns that are insensitive.
Our Marketing Projects Will Avoid the Saviour Complex
Sometimes well-intentioned people target a perceived need for support without including and empowering the affected community. They may use their access to resources to provide a solution solely from their external position of privilege. This approach can be characterised as a saviour complex and resulting communications, solutions, and power dynamics are often problematic and reinforce systems of oppression.
Dignity vs Focusing on the Problem
As marketers we choose how to represent people. Typically people who have barriers in their lives are in the best position to remove those barriers. The process of dignification, deep understanding, and empowerment are the first steps toward solving key social issues. It is also important to recognise and understand the social and economic systems that lead to the issue in the first place.
Any complex issue likely has multiple causes and multiple potential solutions and it’s important as marketers for organisations that are trying to address any social or environmental issue that we humble ourselves and commit to exploring various perspectives and options for how to build campaigns aimed at promoting products or services as solutions to long standing issues.
Using images of people in need, especially stereotypical images, to elicit an emotional response and drive engagement and/or donations from the audience is problematic. This approach all too often misrepresents or oversimplifies issues while dishonouring real people and communities that are in need of support. While it may be tempting to take this approach, it can easily lead to insensitive campaigns and messages that may disempower the communities that we are striving to empower.
We pledge to:
- Take steps to avoid any exploitation, appropriation, or stereotyping of underrepresented or historically oppressed people or groups within marketing content.
- Seek out feedback on the appropriateness and sensitivity of marketing content. This looks different for different projects, but often involves working with the client to seek stakeholder input, and engaging the target audience via surveys, focus groups, or interviews.
- Ongoing internal training to increase awareness of cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness.
We Commit to Permission-Based Email Marketing
We pledge to focus our email marketing on:
- Creating value with our content, informing our audience on metal types, properties of gemstones and jewellery production (eg: our factories and SMO mines) through journal posts, social media posts and email.
- Being GDPR compliant
- Maintaining the trust of email lists by continuing to offer value and restricting messaging to content related to what the original opt-in intent.
We Commit to Ethical Digital Advertising
All advertising content lands somewhere on the honesty spectrum– from manipulative and dishonest to accurate, ethical and honest. Otiumberg is committed to ensuring the accuracy and ethics of the content we promote through digital advertising.
Aside from considering the accuracy and honesty of the content, we must also consider the ethics of the targeting approach. Digital advertising brings its own unique set of ethical issues related to data privacy.
Facebook, Google, and many other digital media companies have developed sophisticated tracking technologies in order to understand, profile, track, and target users online so that their paying advertisers can reach their exact target audience via their digital advertising products and services. This kind of granular targeting often comes at the cost of individual users’ privacy. As consumer attitudes and technologies change, the ethical considerations that surround digital advertising are rapidly evolving. It is highly likely that the line of what is both legal and ethically acceptable will shift many times over the short and long term.
Our approach to Ethical Advertising Includes the following considerations:
- False advertising: we won’t make untrue claims about our products or clearly misrepresent what is being offered
- Advertorial Advertising: we will ensure online users can tell what is paid advertising vs what is editorial content. Advertorial content is content that looks like unbiased editorial/earned media but is actually paid advertising. This type of content can take place on written articles, social media posts, written reviews, or videos. Influencer marketing often relies on the process of well connected social influencers promoting products or services to their audiences, often through content that would be considered advertorial if the influencer is not transparent that the content is a paid promotion. If our brand mention is paid for we will ensure this is clear in the content.
- Pop ups and modal windows: must be helpful for our users rather than degrading their experience and becoming an annoyance (for instance email sign up popups) We will:
- Use them in ways that offer clear value.
- Limit how often they are used, allow people to opt out of modal windows.
- Make it easy to close them
We Commit to White Hat Search Engine Optimisation
Search engines use algorithms to determine what content to show at the top. Anywhere where computers are making decisions that will affect business outcomes opens up the opportunity for hacking and manipulation. In the world of SEO and content marketing, any tactics that are considered manipulative or unethical are typically referred to as “black hat” tactics. On the opposite end of this spectrum, you’ll find ethical or “white hat” SEO tactics based on providing valuable and useful content that aligns with what users and search algorithms are looking for.
We Practise and Encourage the Following Best Practices for White Hat SEO and Content Marketing:
- Link building: we create valuable content that people will want to link to
- We use PR and aligned partnerships to build links
- We properly use redirects to help users find the right content
- We create helpful 404 pages with useful navigation
- We put the user first and focus on value, creating content that aligns with our mission
Black Hat SEO: Tactics that We Avoid and Discourage
- Purchasing links – Paying for links from other websites. Links are built organically out of merit and from real relationships and partnerships.
- Automated link building – we don’t use software or online bots to build links.
- Hidden content and links – we don’t intentionally hide content or links so that only the search engines can see them.
- Automated, stolen or plagiarised content generation – we don’t use content scraping technology, AI content development, or direct content theft to generate high volumes of content to build our site’s size and perceived authority.
- We don’t do keywords stuffing or over optimization
- Misdirection – we do not create unethical redirects, such as cloaking or doorway pages
We Commit to Update these Practices as the Industry Evolves
We expect that our ethical marketing practices must continue to evolve along with the technologies marketers use to discover, reach, and engage audiences. The line that separates ethical from unethical marketing practices can shift rapidly as major online platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other search and social applications roll out updates and new options for data-driven targeting. We will continue to monitor the state of the field across different marketing channels and tactics and update our practices accordingly.
Questions and Feedback
We always strive to do the right thing for our customers and community, and adhering to these ethical practices is part of that work. If you have questions or feedback to share that will help us do better, we encourage you to reach out and let us know.
Please contact us using: hello@otiumberg.com for any of the following:
- To request more information
- To provide feedback
- To access, edit, or delete personal information we may have about you
- To register a complaint