But then something in the user data catches your eye: the most engaged users are young girls, and many of them use the app between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. Some of the feedback they’ve given the marketing team is alarming: “I only like myself when I use the app.” “I don’t like the real me.”
Although technology has changed, it’s a dilemma marketers in this industry are familiar with. Customer insecurities about their appearance are the main driver of beauty product sales. If morally committed, these girls could become loyal customers for decades to come. But no one wants to take advantage of a vulnerable population or lead them unwittingly into harm.
These problems become even more acute as artificial intelligence and big data offer marketers new ways to engage customers through increasingly powerful personalized marketing. For this particular retailer, shutting down the app would shave 20% off the company’s valuation overnight. Keeping it alive will clearly affect the self-esteem of some young users. What should the company do?
Kellogg’s Mohanbir SawhneyMcCormick Foundation Professor of Marketing and Technology Chair, has authored several recent case studies on promise and risk the use of AI to personalize the marketing experience and the ethical questions that may arise.
“The lifetime value of these customers is extremely high. They buy a lot. They’re very engaged. It’s really a marketer’s dream,” says Sawhney. “But there is no escaping the fact that expediency and the path of least resistance is not necessarily the path of good.”
Sawhney offers advice for marketing leaders on how to weigh business and ethical interests when marketing to vulnerable groups — and advice on considering alternative approaches when concerns about vulnerable groups arise.
Establishment of monitoring mechanisms
In the beauty company’s case, their promising new app could quickly become a crisis. Voices within the company may be concerned enough about the campaign’s impact on vulnerable groups to want to see it discontinued. The company may also have concerns about external criticism from customers or advocacy groups. This puts the CEO in a difficult position and there is no single right answer on how to proceed.
Sawhney recommends that the best form of crisis management for any company is to prevent the situation from escalating to a crisis level in the first place. This starts with proactively establishing strong guardrails and monitoring mechanisms to flag unusual or worrisome customer activity.
In the beauty company’s case, systemic monitoring would have warned that teenage girls were showing higher-than-average engagement with the AR tool, or that sales data showed they were buying expensive acid-based wrinkle creams aimed at mature consumers that could actually damage delicate youthful skin.
“Why don’t you have any early warning?” Sawhney says. “The preadolescent demographic is known to be vulnerable.”
If a CEO catches something they’re not comfortable with—or think their customers won’t like—their best bet is to act quickly and honestly.
“You have to make a dispassionate decision about how to contain the blast radius,” Sawhney said. “Apologise, and do it quickly. Don’t hide it. Don’t pretend it’s not there. Covering it up is worse.”
For example, when Meta realized it had a problem with younger users, it eventually created Instagram Teen accounts with parental controls and other security measures. But that only happened after its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, tried to explain to Congress why Meta was ignoring research showing that Instagram damaged the self-esteem of teenage girls.
“You want to get ahead of it and say, ‘Hey, we looked at the data. We don’t like what we’re seeing, and even though we’re not being asked to do anything by regulators, we’re taking precautions,” says Sawhney.
For the beauty CEO, this could mean shutting down the app at certain times to ensure it doesn’t deprive school children of needed sleep or distract students when they should be focusing in class.
“You can mitigate these problems if you’re proactive,” Sawhney says.
Develop positive campaigns
Today’s marketers have enormous power in their hands—from sophisticated psychological research to data mining and AI-powered personalization. Sawhney recommends using these tools to develop positive marketing strategies for engaging with customers in vulnerable groups.
Sawhney points to two well-known advertising campaigns that each started from a point of empowerment. the “Like a GirlThe Always campaign began when company executives connected the pivotal moment when girls start using feminine products with all the other changes that happen, for better or worse, during puberty.
The marketing team found that during adolescence, girls’ self-esteem drops, they stop playing sports and are socialized by STEM subjects. The company addressed this data by creating videos that showed young women running and throwing with confidence and power, describing in positive and emotional terms what it means to do something “girly.”
“They understood that this transition in life is a very traumatic time, because suddenly your body is changing, your hormones are changing, and you have to deal with this new phenomenon that you may not fully understand,” says Sawhney. “They took the bull by the horns and said, since our product really connects to this stage of life, then why don’t we make that 13-15-year-old experience a positive transition to womanhood, as opposed to a traumatic one?”
Personal care brand Dove has also leaned into this trend through slogans such as “Let’s change beauty” and “True beauty”. of “You are more beautiful than you thinkThe campaign featured a video where a medical examiner draws the faces of women using his own descriptions of their features, and then based on descriptions of them provided by their friends. The images, side by side, show that women perceive themselves much harsher than others.
“These campaigns proactively reposition the brand to one that represents empowerment,” says Sawhney.
Be social, but not too personal
Companies with engaged social media communities can mine these conversations to identify pain points or other opportunities to strengthen messaging. For example, analyzing the conversations of cosmetic buyers may reveal that some young women are being bullied at school. This could give the beauty company an opportunity to redefine beauty products as tools of self-expression and as a means to reclaim practicality and creativity.
Social media can also be a good place to observe how customers are using tools like the augmented reality app, both to track usage and to find new ways to improve the technology. But be careful about getting too close to customers’ lives and preferences, Sawhney says.
As AI becomes more integrated into marketing tactics, decision makers will find themselves walking a fine line between being helpful and, well, creepy. Customers appreciate it when companies give them relevant products and messages. But this very personalization can push the limits of consent. Groups that already feel marginalized or vulnerable may react negatively to companies that seem to know too much about them or use their data too aggressively.
“AI can facilitate much more meaningful and relevant engagement with your customers,” says Sawhney. “But just because you can personalize to the nth degree, doesn’t mean you should.”
In the end, marketing requires ethically new ways of thinking that go beyond pitting people’s interests against the need for profit. This is especially true when it comes to sensitive or vulnerable groups such as young people whose brains and senses of self are still developing. Sawhney acknowledges that this is easier said than done, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
“I think we’re going to have to be a lot more creative in coming up with ideas and interventions that are good for vulnerable demographics, but also make good business sense,” he says.
