An Analysis of Marketing Ethics

An Analysis of Marketing Ethics

Companies rely on marketing to a large extent for marketing bring a direct impact on companies’ actual sales and revenue. Under this circumstances, It’s relatively difficult for marketers who make business decisions to think and act ethically through their decision process. Therefore producers and sellers are supposed to take into account both ethics dimension and financial dimension simultaneously.

In the field of marketing ethics, knowing how to practice ethics in the marketing plays an essential role. It means marketers gain a sense of moral guidance, applying those standards of integrity, fairness and moral regulations to their organizational operation. Good marketing, namely ethical marketing, aims at maintain a long-run relationship with your customers and deliver your value and care for them instead of only focusing on gaining profits or achieving objectives.

In this paper, process-oriented framework will be applied to analyse the ethical issues in terms of product, promotion, pricing and place (distribution).

Firstly, in marketing areas, product is the forerunner of all other dimensions of marketing mix which is crucial for forming a ethical marketing environment. Hence, it’s necessary that companies start with an ethical product and bring positive benefit to their customers convincingly. According to “Due Care” theory, business organizations should pay great attention on relevant factors that ensures product quality. These factors include design, materials, production, quality control, packaging, labeling and warnings. These factors matters a lot in a company’s producing process, and if one company fails in one of them, most likely one may tangle with a ethical problem and suffer loss from both finance and reputation.

In reality, most fast food restaurants have been blamed for not labeling “high calories” onto their product, leading to a high level of childhood obesity. Moreover, A severe food safety accident in China, 2008, revealed that San Lu dairy group added melamine into the milk powder which caused fatal health safety problems. Nowadays, particularly in China, product safety (quality) still arises citizen’s attention and have been regarded as a remarkable element in ethical marketing area.

Secondly, concerning the promotional aspect of marketing, undoubtedly, apart from a large amount of ethical products, marketers can quickly behave unethically in their practices when promote products to potential consumers. Several areas related to promotion of a product will be discussed from a perspective of being ethical or not. Among which, branding, exaggerated claims, marketing to children and Internet marketing are mainly involved in those areas.

Band is closely related to companies’ successful marketing. Customers tend to have a clear and vivid image in their mind when sport commodities with a striking logo such as Nike exposed to their view. As a matter of fact, most people are willing to purchase sporting goods of that brand as long as its image is positive. Consequently, many other sporting goods producers attempt to imitate the design and logo of Nike so as to earn higher profit, taking away Nike’s most valuable marketing tools: their brands. Majority of people consider brand infringement unethical in nowadays business world.