Why do companies in the supplement industry create products that don’t work or are harmful? #ScamCompanies #EthicalBusiness #Entrepreneurship
Are we entering a “post-truth” era where companies prioritize profits over honesty? #SupplementIndustry #Capitalism #BusinessEthics
Is it ethical for companies to knowingly deceive customers for financial gain? #ConsumerProtection #BusinessIntegrity #CorporateResponsibility
How can we maintain faith in capitalism while preventing unethical practices in business? #CapitalismDilemma #BusinessEthics #ConsumerAwareness
Snake oil salesmen were always a thing. Nothing has changed. Things aren’t getting worse. It’s just more out in the open now.
But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
I feel like electrolyte supplements aren’t even the best example of this. Yes they’re overpriced but electrolytes are actually essential for bodily functions…I find that taking salt, potassium, and magnesium is a game changer. I buy them individually in powder form which is a small fraction of the cost of those electrolyte powders.
The real issue is all these companies marketing vitamins/herbal blends/capsules with small insignificant amounts of low quality herbal extracts or whatever…literally does nothing at best and some are full of heavy metals and preservatives and other crap
Hey I feel you.. I see it all around me and just think of a better way. However I’m just me and me alone don’t want to enjoy the task of trying something different🤷♀️ just me saying the truth and thinking if I said it the right way the right people might reach out…
I work in the marketing agency space and some of our competitors charge 3x for half the service. The bad marketing agencies outnumber the good ones easily 10 to 1.
Many founders justify it in different ways.
“Sure, it doesn’t help them as much as we advertise, but at least it still helps them.”
Or “Even though most science shows this is useless, there is *some* research that shows it helps.”
Maybe it’s easy for some founders to look past if they feel like they aren’t really hurting people, even though they aren’t really helping them either.
I personally think the worst is the huge companies / executives in the food industry that are actively making poison for the average consumer. Things like high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners, preservatives, or colors. This stuff kills people, it’s really criminal.
Greed is not a capitalist phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon. There are ethical capitalists and unethical capitalists. Capitalism is merely a legal regime of private property and freedom of contract.
I assure you, in a command and control planned economy there is also greed. It’s just that only folks able to pursue it are the proverbial king and his court.
This field seems to attract psychopaths.
because money, and politics! Politics has been unethical since the days of Plato one might say, so we’ve learned from them and do unethical any time any place. PS Themistocles, a populist and hero of that time worked for Greeks AND for Persians. Alcibiades betrayed Athenians to the Spartans, and a few years later betrayed Spartans to the Athenians 🙂
Completely understand you. But youd be shocked how easy ripping others off comes to some
I work in food & beverage and a lot of the claims made by products are BS and stretch legal limits of what can and can’t be said in advertising.
Today I saw an ad for a new beverage that advertised “No Weird Stuff”
Ingredients for everyone’s products are all sourced from the same ingredient companies and are all process similarly and are all used in the finished goods similarly.
I like how asmongold put it. Why are little kids not allowed into a strip club? It’s illegal. If it wasn’t illegal you think they’d say no to Jimmy standing out front if he had $750 ready to rip?
IMO: it’s obvious businesses cannot self regulate, it’s a conflict of interest. We need laws. But 50+ years of manipulation, deregulation, and lack of oversight have created what is happening now.
When profit and morales collide. For 90 percent of the world profit wins
One of my maybe 3 hobbies is nutrition.
The entire supplement market is crazy. There are so many companies comfortable with selling you literal sand in a bottle that will do nothing for you, and since the market is unregulated it’s way too easy to get away with – not that regulation is a solution necessarily.
I think it’s an interesting space because you can sell pretty much whatever you want and just label some part of the ingredients as “proprietary blend,” skimp on including efficacious doses of active ingredients, and still make millions.
when I saw the supplement market grow exponentially was once social media started taking off. For every company that has unethical, ineffective, mislabeled, underdosed supplements, there are 10 fitness influencers ready to promote it for a quick buck. All we can do at this point is tell people to educate themselves and not just openly believe that the bottled sand being sold by the fitness celebrity (or the guy with a PHD from a school no one’s ever heard of) of the week is the shortcut to getting them stronger, faster.
It’s scale. The unethical companies are more easily able to scale and dominate markets because they take more money from their customers. Unethical companies also have greater margins because they don’t have the same costs of doing business.
As example, tax resolution is an industry which is well known for being predatory on low-income and low-information consumers. The industry is dominated by players who promise much, deliver far less, but charge customers (who have very little) a ton for their services. The big, unethical players can afford to advertise because they have all the money they’ve already taken from customers, so they tend to be able to buy the most promising leads. Most of the national advertisements are from lead agencies that take 40%+ of the up-front money, promise results far beyond what is realistically possible, but then turn over the files to professionals and offer no satisfaction in the event the promised outcome doesn’t happen.
I had a friend try and operate in the tax resolution industry ethically. He made it two years before his ethics nearly led him to bankruptcy and he left the industry forever.
I think the worst one is prime lol. Has 400mg of potassium and very little sodium or other essential minerals that make up “electrolytes”. They are simply trying to be a different hydration drink targeted to their young audience.
Nihilism, I guess. People see how difficult it is to live beneath the poverty line and are like, let’s get money and deal with the morality later, people feel like they are at war. Plus we don’t really have good models for living correctly, we just have CEOs getting stock prices up even at the expense of customer experience. Like, how is “planned obsolescence” moral at all? Even if you aren’t a scam artist, “let’s give people the crappiest product they’ll buy or a super crappy product and eliminate all competitors so they don’t have a choice but to buy garbage”? That’s not how capitalism was supposed to work.
So people are scared, they don’t know what moral behavior even looks like, and I’m an atheist but turns out a lot of people do actually need the threat of eternal damnation to act right. They need it to even be polite at the supermarket.
Sometimes i feelnlike its better to be a villain than someone no one cares about
Obviously money lol
“A good salesperson can sell you a pile of shit” – the business people know this and are simply taking advantage. On the other hand, “trends sell” and people are eager to spend to be relevant in society.
“Take advantage of it for a few years, pile up shit ton of money, retire and then repent to God” – I was told this by one of those.
Lack of moral compass
Biz strat guy here…. it’s about “late stage capitalism” – where the govt and big biz work together to break real competition.
So they don’t protect the consumer.
They gutted the middle class, so who is left?
The powerless and ignorant.
Gambling apps you say?
Surveillance capitalism is thriving in the US.
It is race to the bottom because no one gets punished for “defecting”.
Hell Nestle killed about 5M babies in africa pushing their formula but we still love the chocolate…
Entrepreneurs look around and see this and feel no obligation for the social good.
There’s borderline fraud everywhere these days.
Most companies get to the point of knowing something doesn’t work but truly believe with enough time that they might be able to figure out a way to make it work.
This is where the whole fake it til you make it comes in that runs rampant these days.
This new group of gurus which basically tell people they don’t need experience to start companies and offer services. Just find people that have spare time that do have experience and outsource the work to them.
So sales.
We’re seeing this happen in digital marketing right now. Seems like everyone is a digital marketer and an “expert” with less than 5 years experience and the school of YouTube.
The goal of most people is easy money.
It’s all leverage in most cases specific knowledge against general or lack of knowledge.
Those with slightly more knowledge than those with little or none have leverage to sound smart and spin up grand promises whether or not they can deliver.
Fake case studies, fake logos, fake reviews, fake bots and comments.
I see it all the time.
Trust is basically at an all time low but we’re also pretty lazy in terms of verifying things.
I have repeatedly had people say, “I only want to work with dumb clients, I can charge more and they have no idea what they are actually paying for”
I’m not even joking. 🙃
The problem is we glorify these people and admire them and kids look up to them.
So they want to be like them.
Pull away the veil and you see a lot of unethical behavior with most success stories.
The real problem is inequality and social media.
When obscene amounts of wealth are in the hands of the fewer, they can drown out all means of getting a legitimate business started.
Social media allows you to say anything without proof – look at Alex Hormozi – and it will spread faster than it can be debunked.
From a non-business persons perspective, a lack of morality seems to be more and more common these days. We need money in order to survive, and it has gotten way to expensive to live and only getting worse. When people see that their survival is threatened, they will start to attack. And if that attack comes in the form of lying to others to sell their product than that is what they will do. Ancient brain stuff.
Plus all the horrible stuff (violence, bad behavior) that is all over the media is not helping to raise a healthy society.