Ethical Design for Growth Marketing in Digital Commerce

Why Consider Ethical Design for Growth Marketing?

With more consumers adopting online shopping, it becomes pivotal for brands to gain trust and respect. Acquiring a new customer indeed costs more than maintaining loyal ones. So, the foundational question is how to retain and keep customers.

From the customer's perspective, I would want to stay with a brand for multiple reasons: the services or products I receive, do I feel valued, can I trust the brand no questions asked, and much more.

When traditional customers have now made a significant shift into looking more for "value" and "trust", the brands need to play in the market responsibly. They have to live as a representation of the values they stand for. A brand is built with the cumulative effect of years of trust-building.

The brand builders who work on the ground are the key players in their making. We have all seen how e-commerce has grown dramatically during the 2020s. At the same time, the entire online business ecosystem is bringing out different patterns in consumer behavior.

The source of trust-building is the interactions one has with the business – the website when we consider the digital realm. Making every interaction impactful must be backed by design built on ethical principles.

Simplifying what ethical design is: it's designing a website built on the values that the brand stands for that could cover aspects like fairness, honesty, and inclusivity, to name a few.

As has by now been established by many academicians and industry leaders, growth marketing entails the philosophy of taking into consideration the best of design, marketing, technology, product principles, and data to build a product/service for the customers that would result in growth across business metrics including but not limited to sales, profits, customer retention, conversion rate, etc.

What Is Ethical Design Manifesto?

A social enterprise called Ind.ie is striving for justice in the current Digital world. I am particularly delighted by the way they have defined the Ethical Hierarchy of needs.

*Source: https://ind.ie/ethical-design/

As we study any pyramid structure, if one layer is not accomplished, the purpose driven by the layer on top of it will crash. As an example, if we design a website that supports Human Effort by being convenient, but does not support Human Rights, then it is unethical.

Or say, we build a fancy website to offer a better experience to customers, but it scores negatively in user-friendliness; it's unethical.

From an application standpoint, if we look at a business, we must collectively build a thought process where we are not just thinking about profitability, but also focusing on the foundation stones of how we reach profitability.

With e-commerce having taken the world by storm, especially during the pandemic, it’s expected that consumer behavior will continue to shift towards relying more and more on shopping online. The question arises, how to build a site that the customers rely on?

Indicative Checklist for E-Commerce Website Setting the Stage for Growth Marketing

1. Minimalism: Focus on simplicity and clarity in designing web pages. The target should be reducing the clutter.

   
   

2. Accessibility Compliance: Is the site being built usable by people with disabilities (for example, one with a visual impairment)? Accessibility practices must be incorporated from the get-go and not be left as a candidate for retrofitting.

   
   

3. Product Detail Page: The description of the products is a primary decision factor for buying. Ensure it calls out all necessary information. Example: Consider a jewelry business, if the source of the diamonds is mentioned in the PDP, it gives a picture of the social and economic impact of the purchase, and the consumers can make more informed decisions.

   
   

4. Product Listing Page: One great example of looking at the endless scrolling design is to ask, have we assessed whether we need infinite scrolling or a Load more option?

   
   

5. Transaction Security: Does the site provide a secure shopping transaction mechanism? Is there a provision for instant verification and validation of credit card transactions?

   
   

6. Privacy Policy: Are the Privacy Policies clearly called out?

   
   

7. Terms & Conditions: Are the Terms and Conditions clearly called out?

   
   

8. Data Privacy Policies: Have you implemented the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)/geography-specific data policies? To know what laws apply to the site you are building or maintaining, you can start by understanding where the site traffic is coming from.

   
   

9. Contact Us page: Can the link to the Contact Us page be easily located by the visitors on the site? Does the Contact Us page provide clear instructions on how to reach out to the business?

   
   

10. Cookie Policies: Are you treating the data of the customers properly? Are you displaying all transparency in preferences to the customers?

    
    

11. Transparency: Are there features/subscriptions with clear options to turn off/unsubscribe? Example: Consider the subscription option for a 30-day free trial in which post the free-trial period, the customers are charged automatically without any reminders or notifications. This is a gap because the customers were not given the right direction to make an informed choice.

    
    

12. Legal Team Backing: Is the content published on your site approved by your legal team? Are you confident and clear about what laws to abide by?

What Influences Ethical Designing?

From the point of view of a creator (for example, a designer or a developer), we need to think about putting ourselves in the audience's shoes. The way they design should reflect their sense of responsibility towards the customers.

In the daily hustle of chasing deadlines, creators tend to just focus on ‘What features to build’ and lose out on the essence of ‘Am I building it responsibly, taking into account how it will be used by the real end users'?

From the perspective of a product manager or a leader, one must plan the implementation in such a way that sufficient efforts are dedicated towards not only building a design but also thoroughly brainstorming the pros and cons of various solutions.

This will help navigate to an optimum solution that will be impactful from a business standpoint. There’s no one approach to influencing ethical design as it’s difficult to put down a list of what’s good for the people or customers visiting the website.

However, what we can work towards is identifying and following certain principles that are core to the business and that we have learned or understood that affect customer behavior. When in a dilemma, one may consider asking these questions to themselves to drift toward a solution:

1. Who are going to be the end users of this feature/capability/application?

   
   

2. Why are the end users going to use this feature/capability/application?

   
   

3. What’s the demographic we are looking at?

   
   

4. Is the design easy to use?

   
   

5. Has the design been reviewed and challenged by peers or leads?

   
   

6. Have you incorporated the feedback received?

   
   

7. Am I using highly persuasive content messaging to impact user behavior?

   
   

8. Am I using some content that might be abusive or derogatory to the audience?

Benefits of Adhering to Ethical Principles of Growth Marketing

• Brand Building: Since ethical design guidelines help to achieve coherence in presentation and clarity in use for customers, it contributes to building the 'signature mark' that the company strives to achieve.

• Competitive Differentiator: Following all ethical design principles will make the brand stand out in the market as one that lives up to one's values.

• Conversion Rate: With a consistent and clear design, if customers find what they are looking for, it will certainly lead to a higher conversion rate, and thus, an increase in profitability.

• Compliance: Being compliant with all data collection, accessibility policies, and other geography-specific norms aids in reputation building.

What Is the Future of Ethics in Growth Marketing?

Those working in the technology industry are now aware of concerns regarding customer data collection and its implications. This consideration of all available data as raw material to utilize for business purposes is termed "surveillance capitalism."

Surveillance capitalism refers to *the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.

This data is then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.

There is a growing awareness regarding the basics of what happens to the data the customers share with the businesses and what could be the repercussions if necessary precautions are not taken care of.

With customers becoming more and more aware of how their data is going to be used, their behavior toward how they interact with a business website is also shifting. Gradually, the control is moving to the customers.

What they want to share with the businesses and what they want to avoid. With such fierce competition in the market, businesses' top priority will always be customer retention.

In order to strengthen the trust between the brand and the customer, businesses will take a turn toward a purposeful and ethical transaction interaction over just a transactional one in order to surge sales. Data is one prime element when it comes to ethics.

However, there are myriad dimensions that are undergoing transformation, including designing pages, effective and empathetic content messaging, inclusivity of users, etc.

As we become more aware of our roles, the more we will be successful in establishing businesses and brands that stand for truth and integrity.

When the purpose is strong and the trust of customers is built, the easy and quick gimmicks of increasing conversions will be warded off the way as the short-term gains.

Just like the age-old saying, "Character begins at home", the first step in ethical design also begins with an individual becoming aware of themselves first. One should take this up as one’s responsibility to make the site they are building much better than what was expected of them.

There’s a lot that "can" be done, but one should make it a point to follow what "ought" to be done. For all Potterheads reading this, Albus Dumbledore was right all this time when he said, "It is our choices, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

*Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/