In our group presentation on Stealth Marketing, we began by describing what this phrase means and listed the various types of stealth marketing that are practiced by companies today. We continued by illustrating a specific example of stealth marketing, a campaign done by BlackBerry, taken from an article included in our listed sources. In this instance, BlackBerry basically hired attractive women to dress up and go out to bars armed with BlackBerry Pearls (Osterhout, 2010). Their intent was to flirt with guys, hand them their phones so they could type their phone numbers in, and to purposely not keep their promise to call them at a later date (Osterhout, 2010). The marketing aspect of this example was that the men would be exposed to the BlackBerry Pearl product, and that they would hopefully give feedback to the hired female actors without knowing that they were participating in this marketing scheme (Osterhout, 2010).

We went on to state our opinion that in this case, the stealth marketing technique was not ethically right because BlackBerry was taking advantage of these innocent men who were involuntarily thrown into their marketing ploy while being under the impression that they were getting a girl. We also discussed other examples of stealth marketing by numerous companies and presented the following question to our audience: Do you think that this is a clever way of marketing or is it deceptive? How would you feel if this was done to you? As we learned fro mthe class discussion, not only was this presentation an eye-opening experience for Jess Nelson, Iqra Mir and I but it was also a surprise to the rest of our classmates.

Source:

Osterhout, J. (19 April 2010). “Stealth marketing: When you're being pitched and you don't even know it!” Retrieved from http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-04-19/entertainment/27062069_1_stealth-marketing-buzz-marketing-blackberry-pearl