Duplicity in Alternative Marketing Communications

Abstract

In the past couple of decades, following the advancements in communication technologies, alternative marketing communications such as consumer generated content, influencer marketing and native advertising, have emerged as a viable and gainful tactic. These alternative marketing communications blur the boundaries between the roles of consumer and marketer. The possibility of duplicity and deception in marketing relationships is fueled by the ambiguity of these roles and the lack of clarity in persuasion knowledge when alternative marketing communications are utilized. In this paper, we illustrate the various types of duplicity in marketing relationships that use alternative marketing communications. We adopt a conceptual framework previously developed in this budding literature stream by Pehlivan et al. (2015), and use it to suggest that the notion of ‘unidirectional deception’ (i.e. marketer deceives consumer) needs to be updated to ‘omni-directional deception’, in order to better explain duplicity in current marketing relationships. We use examples encountered in contemporary marketing practices to derive managerial implications and best practices as well as ethical implications or questionable practices for these types of communications. More importantly, this paper suggests that future research should examine duplicity in marketing by minding the new omni-directional dynamic of marketing relationships.