This seasonal finale of "The Dark Side of Marketing" focuses on something once called "pure, white and deadly." It's not cocaine — it's sugar! Several decades ago, the Sugar Lobby found some unscrupulous ways to cover up the deadly consequences of its own product by pointing to another food ingredient as most detrimental to health — fat. What can be learned about the Sugar Lobby's tactics that can actually be used for good when marketing your own B2B products and services?

This episode's topic discusses the thin line between propaganda and marketing. Sharing information with the intent to persuade is a common objective of both propaganda and marketing. However, effective propaganda has one characteristic that marketers sometimes miss. What can be learned about effective propaganda appeals that marketers can use for good?

This episode's topic features "The Pharma Bro" — a now-jailed pharmaceutical executive who limited the supply and raised prices of rare drugs. It worked for awhile, but ended badly. From this case, ethical marketers can learn how to evaluate their opportunities to improve price without alienating customers, the public and regulators.

We continue analyzing the dark side of marketing by studying the Opioid Crisis. The villains in this tragedy, Purdue Pharma, executed a joined-up marketing and sales plan that led to untold suffering. We want our listeners who are marketing highly-valuable - and sometimes even life-saving products -  to put these approaches to use for good purposes!

In this episode, we continue shining the light on the dark side of marketing by studying the "The Social Dilemma." What can B2B marketers learn from this popular Netflix documentary that explores controversial aspects of social networking? What can you put to use in your markets for the benefit of your customers?

In season 7, we are shining some light on "the dark side of marketing." People with less-than-wholesome ideals sometimes use marketing brilliantly. What can "the good guys" learn? In this week's episode, we discuss the $100m business of Ashley Madison — an online dating service that specializes in hooking up people who are already married!

In this week's episode, we discuss customer acquisition costs and how to make a "reverse ROI argument." A reverse ROI argument aims to prove that marketing's efforts made a downturn in revenues less dramatic than they could have been had marketing done nothing at all.

Digging deeper on the last episode's discussion of customer-level ROI metrics, the team unpacks a variety of ways to measure —and more importantly — grow your share of every target customer's business. "Is your company just stapling together your strategy, or is it more coordinated than that?"

Marketers can’t be content to be judged by short-term campaign metrics only. Mary, Sean and Tom outline a host of longer-term metrics that are great for the overall health of a company—and help marketing investments be evaluated more fairly. "Marketers who aren't measuring customer lifetime value are missing an opportunity to get financial types off of their back."

As the marketing function becomes more strategic in a company, it becomes harder to discern its impact. The team talks about how marketers can solve this dilemma. "Marketers need to look for opportunities to take partial credit—or partial blame—for other functions results if they are to be thought of as orchestrators of a company's strategy."