Marketing with integrity—that’s a tough nut to crack when you’re trying to make a sale. On the one hand, you want to be sensational. We’re the best! The only! Your life will never be the same! Conventional wisdom tells that the bigger the claim, or the louder the voice, the more attention you’ll get.

On the other hand, some businesses (maybe yours) are faced with audiences that are smarter than ever. They don’t necessarily trust everything that advertising tells them, which means the conventional wisdom may not work. They also expect brands to express and act on values they believe in.

But not every brand is—or should be—the next Patagonia.

Which raises a lot of questions for marketers: In this landscape, how does a business have ethical marketing practices? What does it look like to protect the bottom line while marketing, and having marketing agency relationships, built on principals?

What is marketing with integrity?

Keep reading. We think we’ve figured it out.

But First: What Do You Get Out of It?

Just like your Return on Investment (ROI) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), the practice of truth-based marketing has its own metric: the Return on Marketing Integrity, according to professor Lynn Upshaw at UC-Berkley. He suggests that you calculate it the same way you would the Return on Marketing Investment but replace the marketing investment with the integrity of the marketing effort itself. His blog on the topic is a great read, but as he says, “Simple enough to explain, considerably more difficult to measure.”

However, if brands take the time to calculate the benefits of their ethical marketing practices, they can unearth priceless information like:

• Why customers stay loyal, increasing revenue as a result
• How to gain a competitive edge, especially when less forthright brands have their mistruths discovered
• What to do to maintain brand health—having integrity could lower the potential for negative PR and revenue declines over time

Those are just a few reasons why you should care about marketing with integrity. So now that you’re really paying attention: what is it?

Marketing with Integrity is a way of conducting business and creating advertising that we’ve learned is built on four foundational qualities: honesty, reliability, accountability, and respect.

It All Starts with Honesty

You might also see people call it transparency in marketing. For brands, it means being straightforward about the ingredients in the craft beer you sell, the amenities in your luxury real estate building, or the terms and conditions when someone’s buying a ticket to your event. You wouldn’t want someone to spend their money only to feel blindsided by something you didn’t mention—or worse, blatantly misrepresented—in your ads. When you begin connecting with customers on a foundation of truth, you’re setting yourself up for a loyal, long-term relationship.

As for the agency side, honesty means being all truth and no spin in our client relationships. An agency with ethical marketing practices won’t sell you on a campaign they can’t produce, or upsell you an additional piece of a go-to-market strategy that should just be part of the strategy to begin with. They’ll also be straightforward in their recommendations. That means even if  you and your agency disagree, you won’t mind their pushback, because you’ll know their insights are coming from a place of respect—not an agenda to drain your budget.

It Extends to Reliability and Accountability

Reliability is an extension of honesty—it’s honesty, consistently in action. For brands, it means that they follow through on what they tell customers they’ll do, and that their product or service works as advertised. The same goes for agencies. When a principaled agency says they’re going to run an ad, they do it. When they say they’ll give be able to track conversions on your digital paid media, you’ll see that info on the next reporting call.

If reliability is honesty in action, then accountability is honesty in reflection. For an agency that does marketing with integrity, it’s another form of transparency in marketing that mean’s discussing the losses just as much as it means celebrating the wins. That’s because those agencies see the opportunities in failure. One of those is the opportunity to make future efforts better. By being forthright about declining site traffic, for example, a team might open the door to discovering ways they can optimize on-page SEO or positively impact the first intentful paint time.

Another is the opportunity to deepen their relationship with you, the client. Holding themselves accountable to you when something doesn’t work out is a sign that they understand the respect you deserve. That’s not necessarily a comfortable conversation, but it can make it easier for you to trust them in the long run—and to celebrate the victories that will eventually come around.

And They’re All a Sign of Respect

Adopting ethical marketing practices of honesty, reliability, and accountability is a sign of respect. It means your agency:

• Appreciates your trust in them
• Understands the impact their work has on your business
• Has an authentic interest not only in doing effective work, but in helping you succeed

So How Do You Find an Agency That Does Marketing with Integrity?

We’ll make it easy: talk to Mascola Group.

We’re the Connecticut marketing agency that is Marketing with Integrity. For more than 30 years, we’ve been practicing transparency in marketing, holding ourselves accountable to our clients, and reliably producing winning creative, strategy, paid media, SEO, and web development services—honest. Our approach has helped us build relationships with lifestyle, travel, B2B, and luxury clientele that have lasted more than a decade.

So whether you’re looking for a forthright advertising partner, a Connecticut marketing agency, or you’re excited to finally find an agency that not only thinks about marketing with integrity (a lot) but puts it in action, contact the experts at Mascola Group.