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Juul had this radio campaign that was made up of 2 spots one after the other. The 1st spot would give you the pluses of the product followed by the warnings and
by WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
Juul had this radio campaign that was made up of 2 spots one after the other. The 1st spot would give you the pluses of the product followed by the warnings and how it was not for kids. The second spot would imply that what you had heard about Juul's minuses and warnings were false. They were not blatantly saying it but because of the way, the 2 spots were played one after the other you certainly got the idea. It was a bit surreal. It certainly minimized the minuses and warnings. In a way, it was brilliant since you could never prove that they were trying to undermind the warnings but it certainly had that effect. It's a shame they were using it to promote their products rather than a product that is good for you.
They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.
- Simon_says 7y agoIs there somewhere I can listen to these two spots?
- i_feel_great 7y ago>>They have some brilliant marketing people working for them. These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful. To go along with this shit in this day and age is utterly contemptible. Imagine all the people and the planning and the brainstorming to come up with such a trick - how can any of them not feel really really bad and storm out of the room? Oh yeah, profit.
- trevyn 7y ago“It’s for profit” is a knee-jerk, relatively thought-free answer. There is a deeper answer, and the door to it is seeing that different people can have very different underlying beliefs and motivations, which are not necessarily morally better or worse, just different.
- blub 7y agoWhat motivations could those be, making as many people as possible addicted and sick? The former are usually called drug dealers and the latter psychopaths.
- cat199 7y ago> These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful. these two things are not mutually exclusive. one implies intelligence/skill, the other implies honesty/sound ethical principles.
- solveit 7y agoI'm seeing this sort of thing often these days. People absolutely insist on taking a moral stand on the flimsiest of situations. Not everything is a value judgement for Christ's sake, sometimes words just mean what they mean!
- shkkmo 7y agoBrilliant is quite commonly used to mean "very good" or "excellent" in the UK, so it is not unreasonable to assume there is some value judgement implied.
- pushpop 7y agoBeing “very good at marketing” also doesn’t mean “honest at marketing”. I too would prefer it if every professional had the same moral compass you and I have; but that is a separate issue. Hence why people can be both successful and arguably immoral.
- jacquesm 7y agoMarketing is pretty much dishonest by definition.
- TomMarius 7y agoIt's not. There is a commercial for a hospital next to my house. On it is a photo of one of their best doctors (very well known and respected), saying "I work for this hospital because they enable my success". 100% honest. I wouldn't know he works at that hospital without that commercial and would never visit him without it. I am thankful.
- MaximumYComb 7y agoI suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved. I remember having dinner with a developer who worked on pokie machines. He fully believed that there was nothing wrong with the machines and that people just needed to have self control. This is someone who's job involved programming the highly addictive things.
- vmurthy 7y ago> I suspect there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved Edit : Some more context I find it fascinating what people do to get rid of the dissonance. In India, we have a heavily regulated tobacco industry. In a debate , I remember someone from a cigarette manufacturing company (who don't manufacture any other tobacco products) commenting that relative to beedi [1] and chew-able tobacco, cigarettes are better because they are less harmful and bring in more revenues to the government! [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi
- dr_dshiv 7y agoFrom a public health perspective, I think Juul/vape products would be extremely helpful in a place like India.
- sails 7y agoRelevant, add Indonesia and China. https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/01/indonesia-seeks-to-curb-e-cigarettes-but-not-the-normal-sort https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/01/indonesia-seeks-to... Despicable industry across the board.
- vmurthy 7y agoThis piqued my interest. Can you please explain how? From what I understand, Juul/vape products don't contain tar which is supposedly the worst offender in a cigarette. Is that what you meant?
- tk75x 7y ago
- point78 7y agoBrilliant and morally acceptable are definitely two different things
- ACow_Adonis 7y agoTrue, but average people with nefarious morals might look comparatively brilliant because the scope of total things they can and are willing to do is greater, whereas decent people would just self-select out of those activities. Additionally, and tragically, because they work in a field with a psychological cost, their market wages are higher to compensate, meeting a second metric simple folk use to judge merit/competency. And so outsiders look in and say "brilliant", when really it's just a bunch of otherwise average performers, paid well, willing to do what others won't and open to a greater palette of possible actions because of it. To quote BR from thank you for smoking: "We don't sell Tic Tacs for Christ's sake. We sell cigarettes! And they're cool and available and addictive. The job is almost done for us!"
- tremon 7y agoTrue, but we shouldn't celebrate brilliance when it's applied to do morally reprehensible things, like the OP was doing (intended or not).
- PavlovsCat 7y agoHow could one possess "exceptional clarity and agility of intellect" and then not apply it to moral questions?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoMoral questions require empathy. If you have no empathy, moral questions only interest you to the extent that they imply potential benefits for you.
- lagadu 7y agoPlus morality is highly subjective and beliefs on what is moral varies by individual.
- dchichkov 7y agoCould tweaking the profit function result in a better alignment? For example, issue a fine for every confirmed sale that reached someone in the wrong age group. Upon the return of the unused product direct the proceeds of the fine back to the person that made the purchase.
- Archit3ch 7y agoIt would result in perverse incentives. Teenager willingly buys e-cig for $50, reports e-cig company for $150 fine, then returns the unused e-cig in exchange for the proceeds of the fine. Even without a refund, they just made $100.
- joshuaissac 7y agoIs that such a perverse incentive? It is roughly equivalent to the regulator hiring the teenager for $100 at the company's expense to check if the company is following the rules about not selling to teenagers, except the teenager only gets paid if the company violates the rules.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoWhy is that a perverse incentive? If the baseline is that it’s illegal to sell such things to kids, then this seems like a roundabout way to hire kids as a forcing mechanism to make companies really careful not to do this.
- moftz 7y agoContribute the fine towards smoking cessation programs. A teenager doesn't need their money returned to them if they get caught buying tobacco products.
- SkyBelow 7y agoNeed? No, I guess they don't. But if we want to incentive the teenagers to report, monetary incentives seems to work.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoLook at their website. They actually think they have a mission to cure mankind from cigarettes.
- ohithereyou 7y agoThey're willing to sell you both the problem they're trying to fix and the fix for the problem they sold you. Talk about modern capitalism in a nutshell.
- pssflops 7y agoThe company that produces "radar guns" for police to track motor vehicle speeds also produces the "radar detector" for civilians to be wary of police speed traps.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThey're on a mission to make money. The marketing copy on the website is just fluff in support of that goal.
- paulcole 7y agoIs it any weirder than essentially every American turning a blind eye to climate change? Or even worse the ones who claim to care but do nothing to change their life and put in no effort towards changing society at large? To me it’s not weird at all. People can ignore an awful lot if it doesn’t affect them directly and immediately. It’s even easier if they benefit in some way.
- SkyBelow 7y ago>These people are not brilliant. This reminds me of the following quote. "After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things — terrible, yes, but great." -Ollivander It seems our language has some aversion to recognizing desirable traits in undesirable people. Almost like recognizing the trait is seen as praising the trait and praising the trait is seen as praising the person.
- ta346636346 7y agoThey have some sociopaths focusing purely on making a buck at the expense of people's lives working for them, would be the way I look at. Brilliant marketing to me is just abusing our evolutionary baggage and manipulation.
- ryan-allen 7y agoIn Australia here, gambling is a bit of a problem across the country, but the governments make so much tax revenue it is allowed to continue. I know someone who works for one of the big betting companies here. He writes software that aids in direct targeting of problem gamblers based on their social profiles and anything else they can get their hands on. Pushing drugs is bad but pushing gambling is totally legal. Suffice to say I'm not a huge fan of said bloke, I think you're selling your soul to the devil, so to speak.
- danieltillett 7y agoI hope he is hopeless.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y agoWell ya. When your company's product is a net minus for society then you have to wonder about the ethics of everyone involved. Ya, they're doing it for the bux with little care for the consequences.
- malka 7y agoI honestly think that the People choosing to work for big tobbaco should be killed. All of them. They purposely push poison onto us.
- SkyBelow 7y agoSeems a bit extreme. I imagine that one could easily extend this logic to apply to almost any group. Anyone making anything but the healthier foods tastier or cheaper. Any innovation that enables laziness. People who build elevators. Pretty much all of IT.
- roberto 7y ago> It's a shame they were using it to promote their products rather than a product that is good for you. Those don't need to be promoted, usually.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoDo you believe the consumption of fruits and vegetables should be promoted?
- CathedralBorrow 7y agoWhy not?
- jacquesm 7y ago> They have some brilliant marketing people working for them. FWIW I hate people like that. If that's the best you can do with your creativity then you're no better than a scientist that works on chemical weapons.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- danieltillett 7y ago... or worse biological weapons. If we don't want very smart people working on things like this then total moral condemnation is the way to go.
- goatinaboat 7y agothen total moral condemnation is the way to go Indeed. If people understood that with Phillip Morris or Facebook on their CVs they would be unemployable afterwards, they might think twice.
- krotton 7y agoI think the problem is more complex here, as these are usually not in-house marketing people who have willingly chosen to market cigarettes, but rather people working for external marketing agencies for whom promoting Philip Morris' products is just one of many projects imposed on them. They haven't really chosen to market tobacco, but would probably have a hard time objecting to this one particular project, if they otherwise like the job.
- charliesome 7y agoIf marketing tobacco products isn't where one draws the line, where would the line be drawn? We must not give a pass to people who work on bad things simply because their boss told them to do so.
- madez 7y agoIt's not like they are bad people who set out in the morning to make the world a worse place. If you want change, you must question what makes people behave that way. The extreme focus on economic success of individuals combined with a lack of solid social security is what my intuition tells me drives people to do things at work that damage other people. Is there research about this?
- hrktb 7y agoHow would you account for people self-persuading themselves when they take the job, and know to keep that belief alive for self-preservation ? We have inate abilities to model reality in a way that helps us, not just in a cognitive dissonance way, but in strategic ways as well. It's the classic "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.". It's wildly viewed as a skill, and in a lot of cultures marked as a sign of adulthood to be able to deceive yourself to overcome your primary reaction.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoFor many people the choices are limited - do work that harms others, or suffer harm yourself. People whose morals are strong enough to suffer the harm and deal with the uncertainty of trying to find morally-responsible work aren't that common. And as soon as you have family responsibilities, the pressures increase. The underlying problem is that compliant behaviours and attitudes are rewarded, sometimes generously, while dissident attitudes and behaviours are punished - often in ways that imply the dissident brought misfortune on themselves. There's absolutely no mainstream reinforcement of the suggestion that many aspects of the culture this happens in are toxic and have a skewed moral foundation, and plenty of reinforcement of its opposite - that the culture is healthy, generous, open, and perhaps even the best of all possible cultures.
- tropicalia 7y agoIs there research about this? Yup - we might say that as a topic, it's been discussed throughout the ages. For example there are the findings of this guy Paul the Apostle (as summarized by an unknown transcriptionist sometime in the 1st or 2nd century): For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. -- 1 Timothy 6:10
- cowsandmilk 7y ago> it was brilliant since you could never prove that they were trying to undermind the warnings actually, many times you can prove these things. produce the contract showing that juul paid for one ad to run after the other and they are really screwed. Or prosecutors who have a spine could easily just record the number of instances of the ads running together vs. separately and use that as evidence they are not intended to be separate ads. (It might even be possible to subpoena radio stations for their records that would show this). Generally, judges don't take kindly to the type of "brilliance" that would be going into court and claiming "But they are two separate ads, so we weren't being misleading" if Juul indeed arranged for them to run one after the other.
- SkyBelow 7y ago>Generally, judges don't take kindly to the type of "brilliance" I see this claim constantly mentioned, how judges really dislike loopholes and such, yet at the same time it seems like lawyers specialize in doing just this. It feels like there are some 'gotchas' that work in court and others that do nothing except anger the court and lawyers are the only ones allowed to know which is which.