NZ Marketing Best Practice Guidelines 2025 your go-to resource for strategies, insights, and tools to elevate marketing performance.
This guideline is based on 9 basic principles:
1. Ethical Conduct
- Honesty and Transparency: Avoid deceptive practices and provide clear and accurate customer information.
- Truthful: marketing collateral should be accurate and truthful about products, services, and pricing.
- Respect for Privacy: Collect, store, and use customer data responsibly. Obtain customer consent for data collection.
- Fair Competition: Engage in fair competition, avoid defaming competitors, and ensure marketing strategies are based on the value of your offerings.
2. Customer-Centric Approach
- Understand Customer Needs: Conduct market research to understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points.
- Customer Feedback: Encourage and act on customer feedback to improve products and services.
- Customer Lifetime: Build long-term relationships by identifying customer needs and tailor marketing strategies to address these effectively.
- Customer complaints: Handle customer concerns promptly and efficiently.
3. Content and Communication
- Value-Driven Content: Create valuable, relevant, and engaging content.
- Collateral: Ensure that marketing collateral educates, informs, and encourages your audience to act.
- Communication Channels: Develop a multi-channel approach to marketing communications.
- Personalisation: Establish a one-to-one communications strategy.
- Consistent Branding: Maintain consistency in brand messaging, tone, and visual identity across all marketing channels.
4. Digital Marketing
- SEO/GEO Best Practices: Optimise your website and content for search engines and AI to improve visibility and organic traffic.
- Social Media Engagement: Actively engage with your audience on social media platforms. Respond to comments, messages, and feedback in a timely and professional manner.
- Email Marketing: Personalise campaigns based on customer behaviour and preferences.
- Anti-Spam: Ensure compliance with anti-spam laws and provide easy unsubscribe options.
5. Advertising and Promotions
- Truthful Advertising: Ensure all advertisements are truthful, substantiated, and not misleading.
- Terms and Conditions: Disclose all terms and conditions clearly.
- Ethical Promotions: Conduct promotions and discounts ethically. Ensure customers understand the terms of promotions.
- Message: Focus on product benefits not on features.
- Children: Advertising aimed at young audiences should be sensitive to their credulity, vulnerability and lack of experience.
6. Compliance and Legal Considerations
- Adhere to Regulations: Stay up to date and comply with all relevant marketing and consumer protection laws.
- Data Protection: Adhere to privacy and data protection laws. Implement robust data security measures to protect consumer information.
- Avoid Misleading Claims: Do not make false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims about products or services. Ensure all promotional materials are accurate and verifiable.
- Self-Regulation: Comply with industry codes and regulations, including local advertising standards.
- Intellectual Property: Respect intellectual property rights. Avoid using copyrighted material without permission and give proper credit when due.
7. Consumer Protection
- Fair Practices: Do not exploit vulnerable consumers and ensure marketing practices are fair and equitable.
- Clear Disclosures: Provide clear and prominent disclosures regarding any fees, terms, and conditions. Ensure that all claims are backed by evidence.
- Unfair Contracts: Avoid unfair or inequitable consumer contracts.
- Complaint Resolution: Establish a clear process for handling consumer complaints and resolving disputes promptly and fairly.
8.Social Responsibility
- Sustainable Practices: Incorporate sustainable and environmentally friendly practices in marketing strategies. Promote products and services that contribute positively to society.
- Community Engagement: Engage with and contribute to the community. Support social causes and demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR).
9. Training and Development
- Skill Development: Invest in continuous training and development. Stay updated with the latest marketing trends, tools, and technologies.
- Knowledge Sharing: Foster a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration within the marketing team and across the organisation.
Source: Keith Norris, 26 September 2025