Beware of Bad Buzz. (Editor's Note).

It used to be that lying was something a leader would be ashamed of. Now more and more CEOs of consumer-oriented companies--led by the nose by the 29year-olds running their marketing departments--are encouraging their employees and contractors to lie.

The CEOs and marketing departments don't call it lying, of course. They call it buzz marketing, and it works like this: Find people who look like your customers. Better yet, find people so attractive or hip or strange or friendly that your customers wish they looked like them. Pay these attractive, strange, friendly hipsters to wear, drink, eat, ride, or otherwise use your products. Most important of all, tell the hipsters in your employ not to reveal, at least for a while, that they work for you. That way, the theory goes, your dull, unattractive, socially challenged customers will buy your product, not based on its merits, but to be part of the cool crowd you've created.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

It's hard to figure out who's dumber m a buzz marketing scheme: the consumers duped by "friends" who only want to sell them useless stuff, the marketing pimps who hire product prostitutes in the first place, or the CEOs whose common sense is so withered that they can believe that bamboozling customers is a good long-term strategy.

Which is not to say that Buzz doesn't work. In fact, at least in the short term, viral marketing can be staggeringly effective: witness the success of such Internet-chat and word-of-mouth marketing successes as the low-budget, independent film The Blair Witch Project or the Harry Potter books. With more companies struggling to break through the clutter in traditional marketing channels, it's no wonder that firms ranging from Ford to VF Corp. are hiring so-called "influential" customers to hawk everything from cars to jeans. We're in the experience economy, the marketing gurus tell us. Product placement, whether in movies or in the hands of the influential next to you, enhances your experience of a brand, regardless of how it got there.

The problem is that the influentials don't always reveal their corporate backing. And while that omission may help sell another unit or two of product now, it's a risky proposition. Imagine how your customer will feel when he learns that instead of making him look cool, your product merely makes him look like a sap.

Imagine what that customer will say to a company that allows him to experience its trust, its belief in his intelligence, in this way. Imagine how much more of your product that customer will buy. Imagine how long it will be before he ever trusts your brand again.

Imagine, too, the reputation CEOs will earn among customers and shareholders if they allow their marketers to hoodwink customers by any means, whether deceptive advertising or buzz marketing. Because as somebody famous once said of somebody else famous, it's easy to tell when a buzz marketer is lying.

You just have to wait for his lips to move.