What marketing strategies do you consider unethical, and which ones do you consider brilliant?
During today’s standup meeting, an idea came up about improving our presence on Reddit (for LLM search visibility and similar reasons).
One of the suggestions was to look for high-karma accounts and possibly buy them to appear more credible when posting and mentioning the product within the posts/comments. It’s a tactic, sure, but to me it already feels like it crosses an ethical line. I sometimes worry they can seriously damage a company’s reputation.
There are also other practices, such as:
– Fake purchase counters on websites
– Buying followers and likes
– Exploiting a brand’s reputation
– Spreading misinformation
– Clicking on competitors’ Google ads to drain their budget
And the list could go on.
What do you consider dishonest marketing practices? Have you ever had personal experience with them?
On the other hand, have you ever seen a marketing tactic and thought: “That’s genius!”
Replies
Asa.team
Buying Reddit karma accounts is just bad strategy on top of being shady. Those communities smell inauthenticity fast and the backlash is way worse than whatever you gained.
Best "marketing" I've seen is just being genuinely useful in spaces where your users already are. Boring but it actually compounds.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@ng_junsheng I know that the best thing is to invest the time, unfortunately, not many people have it :D
For MapleBridge, I am trying to avoid exactly this kind of shortcut.
Buying accounts, fake engagement, or spammy backlinks may create a temporary surface signal, but it destroys the trust layer that B2B products actually need.
The slower but better path for us is to turn real sourcing briefs, missing-field checklists, supplier risk notes, and anonymized buyer cases into long-term content assets. It is less flashy, but it compounds because it helps people understand the problem more clearly before they ever talk to us.
So for me, brilliant marketing is not manufacturing trust. It is making real work visible in a way that keeps being useful.
Honestly, anything that relies on fake credibility eventually backfires. You can’t really shortcut trust.
In the long run, consistency + real user value always wins over tactics like buying accounts or engagement.
If anything, building something people actually want to talk about naturally creates the kind of visibility everyone is trying to force.