Ethical questions in Marketing

By brooger on Nov 30, 2009 | In Marketing Tips | Send feedback »

Nowadays, the questions of ethics and moral stance in marketing relationships are at stake in the business world. Perhaps because the consumer is increasingly demanding and informed, perhaps because the tendency to set the company's market competitiveness so lets focus simply on economic and quality for a differential moral, ethical, customer service and customer satisfaction.

Marketing creates needs and wants and then satisfies them? Usually when we see a commercial for beer or coca-cola for instance, it awakens us to the need to consume that product at that time. This is one of the tools and strategies to promote a product.

Follow up:

A similar incidence occurs when we know a new technology, they also fascinate us, for example when a new model cell phone with many new features make us create the need to change our equipment. Thus we see that marketing contributes to the materialism and consumerism often unnecessarily. Wonderful marketing campaigns always fill us with desires.

However, it should be noted that the products, a few years ago were "built to last" as our parents said, today is "made to end", ie the reduction in quality of product strategy has been to encourage constant consumerism, together with the factor of new products into the market. So if my phone that lasted 5 years, now takes about 1 year, but that's okay, (think the client) I was even willing to trade for a recent model.

Ethical questions, not only in marketing but in any area of business or life situation and suffering are relative variation from person to person. What is ethical and moral for me may be immoral to someone else. This is due to culture, values and different mental models of society.

"Not by chance has been found that marketers and businesses have different views about what constitutes ethical and unethical behavior, views ranging from their peers" (Ferrel and Greshan, 1985)

The consumer has become increasingly demanding due to the availability of information and level of knowledge about consumer rights in this way, more likely to punish unethical companies and focus on ethics. Another important concern of the consumer is on environmental issues. The process of manufacturing the product at some stage cause damage to the environment. Is the packaging is economically correct? These are some ethical questions in marketing. With questions and different mental models.