Companies need to focus on experience design strategies to succeed in the marketplace. At the heart of creating experiences, the question for customer-centered professionals is how to understand and address the consumers in a targeted manner so that they find the products and services high in value and continue to maintain a long-run relationship with the brand. Underlying all of this is the business logic. How can the company have significant growth and profits? Furthermore, oftentimes employee compensation is tied to business profits. This dichotomy between providing genuine value to customers and generating business profits can create ethical dilemmas.

Dealing with customers means dealing with their minds and hearts and also with the social context - all of which are subjective and malleable. And this can give the professionals several degrees of freedom to manoeuvre customers’ choices — often without the conscious awareness of the consumers themselves.

Companies can provide false information to claim their offerings have features that actually do not exist at all. One can find several examples of how companies can do so through their website, advertisements on social media, brochure and pamphlets. Energy drinks often claims to increase customers’ concentration and reaction speed. Advertisements for anti-wrinkle creams use altered (too good to be true) pictures of actors to exaggerate the performance of their products.

Moreover, companies need to decide whether to provide any information or not in the first place. Research shows that acts of omission (i.e., failing to do something good) do not feel as bad as acts of commission (i.e., doing something bad). In this case, withholding crucial information might not feel as wrong as providing wrong information. The recent news where the US courts asked a leading FMCG company to pay $417million for failing to provide cancer-related information for its baby powder is a case in point for this.

Related to our digital world, there can be several issues as well. Companies make a case for collecting users’ private data — to understand their customers better. However, companies have been found to monetise this personal and private data by selling it to others. Not only that, such levels of personalisation can open up opportunities to exploit the consumers since there is a fine line between collecting data to understand consumers better and using it to target their vulnerabilities.

Seemingly small breaches — whether intentional or not — can have massive consequences for the brand and even the company. Therefore, it is important to address ways to curb such behaviour especially where the individuals’ rewards can be found in direct conflict with consumer’s interest.

What adds to the difficult is that we, as human beings, are prone to blind spots about our own behaviours. Research tells us that we form lopsided negative views about others and to also behave in ways that are inconsistent with their preferred ethics. People tend to associate unfair acts with others but fair ones with themselves and assume that others do not engage in positive or moral behaviour as frequently as they themselves do. We tend to view ourselves as deserving, competent, and moral and this view obstructs our ability to recognise their own conflicts of interest. We also like to think of ourselves as more ethical than others.

Several conscious steps need to be taken in order to deal with the grey areas related to customer-centric activities. At an employee level, whenever in doubt about own actions, ask for advice from colleagues. Getting a fresh perspective always helps. Second, since most of us face high pressure environment and massive time pressure which in turn exacerbate ethical breaches, we need to ensure that we get adequate rest and downtime. We need to clearly communicate to our teams and superiors if are over-worked so that clear solutions can be obtained.

At an organisational level, proper systems and processes need to be set up within organizations to constantly monitor and address ethically-charged decisions. For example, a Code of ethics should be clearly communicated. Proper documentation is to be made to have a complete record of customer’s journey and her various interactions at each touchpoint. Trainings should be provided to make professionals aware of the unethical marketing practices and their implications.

Addressing the actual needs of customers can help in making their lives better. At the same time, we need to ensure that their vulnerabilities are not exploited for pure business profits. As they say, “with rights comes responsibility.”

(Dr Kriti Jain is a faculty member at IE Busine­ss School, Spain and an EU Marie Curie Research Fellow)