The Ethics Of Marketing And Advertising

Marketing is the function that connects businesses to their target audiences’ needs. It is how a business presents and distributes their product to their audience. For example, a business can market their product by advertising it to the public. This can be seen in many forms of media; such as: on television, via web, posters or on billboards.

Marketing is composed of the performance of business activities, which direct the flow of goods and services from the manufacturers to the consumer. Bothe the advertising and marketing industries operate within federal regulations that are monitored by the federal trade commission. The advertisers have to be careful and act ethically taking extra care when making their adverts.

Marketing is a very unique process that enables limitless methods or variations for an entity to appeal to a particular target market as well as to deter from a particular market. Marketing is used in more than just business; The kinds of clothes an individual wears and the attitude a person portrays can be used to market him or herself to the public for many reasons: Maybe to attract a woman a man is attracted to, possibly to impress the president of a company a person is interviewing for, and even to just create a base of his or her character in which other people will judge him or her by. Marketing is everywhere from the business side of the spectrum to relationships people have

Ethical marketing refers to the application of marketing ethics into the marketing process. Ethical marketing is about making marketing decisions that are morally right. The ethics of the marketing decision can incorporate any part of marketing including sourcing of raw materials, staff employment and product advertising and pricing. Sound marketing ethics are usually those that result in consumer satisfaction, with no negative effect, with the goods and services being recognized or with the company producing them. Ethical marketing generally results in a more socially responsible and culturally thoughtful business community. The concern with ethical issues has changed the attitude of the world towards a more socially responsible way of thinking. This has influenced companies to market their products in a more socially responsible way.

This case study analyzes the experiences of Courtland Kelley at General Motors (GM). Courtland Kelley a third generation GM worker put his job on the line by pushing the GM managers and executives to fully respond to the safety issues found while working as a safety inspector at the company. Kelley along with his supervisor Bill McAleer first discovered the issues while auditing GM cars at rail yards across the country, a spot check of vehicles before the cars were cleared to be delivered to the dealers. McAleer was taken off the audit as a result, who subsequently sued the company seeking whistle-blower protection. The case was eventually dismissed by a judge in favor of GM. The judgement only increased Kelley’s

Each day we are bombarded with advertisements from a plethora of corporations in every waking moment of our lives. Advertising agencies have become so advanced at what they do, that often times we may not even realize we are being advertised a product. This raises an interesting ethical dilemma over a certain type of advertising: persuasive advertising. Philosophers, economists, and business professionals have debated over whether or not persuasive advertising is an immoral violation of the autonomy of consumers. While not all forms of advertising are in and of themselves certainly immoral, persuasive advertising is particularly reprehensible due to the fact that not only does it manipulate our unconscious desires of which we are completely unaware in order to sell a product, but it also routinely leads us to act against our own best interest, thus overriding our autonomy.

Every day in the world, humans face ethical problems and must come to decisions. We use our beliefs of what we think is right and wrong to come to an ethical decision in our day to day life. In the world of marketing and business people are faced with even challenging, complex ethical issues. To help make reasonable ethical decisions business and organizations often make a code of ethics that relates to the business or field as a guide on how you should conduct and make business decisions.

Advertising is any paid form of non-personal communication about an organization, good, service or idea by an identified sponsor (Berkowitz, Crane, Kerin, Hartley, & Rudelius, 494). Advertisements are displayed through various means to a large audience. They can be found on the Internet, in a magazine, or even on the highway. Advertisements are everywhere! Their main goal is to grab the consumer's attention about a specific good, service or institution. To achieve this goal, advertisers use an assortment of techniques. However, some of the techniques used are illegal, unethical, or both. To illustrate, there is an illegal trick known as "bait and switch". This

Advertising is a profession that reflects and molds cultural values and standards in more ways than we may think. Because of advertising’s ability to affect the way people view themselves in the world that surrounds them, it is one of the business functions that receives the most ethical scrutiny. Advertising messages create a lot of debatable ethical issues because the public believes that advertisements affect the way people see themselves and can crucially affect their actions. In 2011, the Journal of Business Ethics summarized reasons why people complain about advertising. The reasons included teaching the idea that happiness comes from possessing valuable things, creating false values in society, causing individuals to be more easily persuaded by distracting them through entertainment and by the use of puffery or exaggerations to make their products appear better than they are. Another reason people complained about advertising was the fact that it is too preoccupied with exploiting sexuality and the human body to persuade people.

Gone are the days when “buyer beware” was the trend. The sellers used to dictate their terms as the competition was less. But after the Liberalization, Globalizations and Privatization in 1991, more companies entered into India. This changed the situation form “Buyer’s beware” to “Sellers beware”. It became more difficult for the companies to sustain in the cut throat competition. They had to shift their focus from product centric to customer centric. Companies had to think smart instead of working hard. There was a need of decisive plan of action to survive in the market.

Now the wind of technological advancement is blowing all around the glob. Our life become so much easy and comfortable. For the sake of explosion of new technology, media, and new opportunities is transforming the marketing and advertising landscape and revolutionizing the way the industry conducts business. The only fact is the transparency that is needed. For the sake of motivating advertising, public relations, and marketing communications professionals to practice the highest personal ethics in the creation and distribution of commercial information to consumers the institute for advertising (IAE) was created.

Advertisers have a lot of opportunities to entice customers in the market these days. Today, consumers are able to pick who they like and what they read. This creates new ethical challenges for advertisers and brand marketers. Ethical marketing encourages honesty, fairness and accountability in all marketing advertisements. However, there are many companies that use unethical advertising because it can be effective, even though it is dishonest. These companies are able to use unethical advertising to outsmart their rivals because some unethical marketing is not really against the law. There is a number of common ethical dilemmas marketers’ face when they participate in

Market research: ethical danger points in marketing research include: - Invasion of privacy – Stereotyping Market audience: ethical danger points include - targeting the vulnerable children, the elderly - Excluding potential customers from the market: selective marketing is used to discourage demand from undesirable market sectors or disenfranchise them altogether. Pricing ethics: list of unethical pricing practice: - Price fixing - Price skimming - Price discrimination - Price wars - Bid rigging - Dumping

In many cases people voluntarily see the advertisement and choose to be open to the idea presented by the marketing agency. However, there is an equally higher number of audience that involuntarily becomes a victim to these sometimes false advertisements. The question that arises here is whether this kind of consumerism is ethical or not. Hundreds of example clearly show how some people buy products that don’t need and wouldn’t buy if they were not falsely advertised, especially in the case of children and of health products. The advertisements happen to ruin family budgets which eventually may cause families to break as well. An act or a campaign promoting such behaviors is most definitely unethical and should be dealt in a way every other ethically challenged matter is taken care of.

Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others.