Ethical Behavior in Marketing

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Ethical behavior in marketing
Marketing research
Marketing Audience
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Ethics can be simply defined as the principles of rightful conduct, which are responsible for shaping up people’s decisions as well as those of organizations. All sectors of governance and operation are required to incorporate ethics in their system in order to be successful. As such, ethical behavior is applicable in the health, businesses, political, and social sectors, among the others.

In marketing, ethical behavior is applied by ensuring fairness when making moral marketing decisions (Hunt and Vitell 12). Ethical behavior does not only create a good image of the organization in the society, but also fosters trust in the marketing systems, hence attracting more customers, which is the main objective in marketing. Several demerits could come about because of failure to apply ethical behavior in marketing.

For instance, organizations could be pressed by the government and the society with regard to their unethical behavior. Since this could significantly affect the business enterprise, ethical behavior ought to be incorporated in the operation systems of every business organization. This paper is, therefore, an analysis of ethical behavior in marketing by looking at the various points where ethics is applied in the marketing systems.

Ethical behavior in marketing

Performing their marketing duties, marketers ought to be ethically responsible for their actions. This is the fact that marketing is a wide sector in the business world; it is divided into various sub-groups all of which require to be ethically conducted. These sub-groups include market research, advertising, promotions, pricing, and the target audience (Hunt and Vitell 6). In this section, some of the expected ethical behaviors will be sampled in the aforementioned marketing subgroups.

Marketing research

This is an important part of marketing in which marketers invest in research and development in order to find out the market demand. Thus, they determine if their intended products will do well. The information that is obtained from the conducted researches is of great significance especially when it comes to marketing the products and services of any given business enterprise.

Nevertheless, during the retrieval of the information from consumers, the latter may consider it as an invasion of their privacy. This may in turn make some of the respondents resistant to revealing some pieces of their personal information. When this happens, the marketers who are required to provide the data may end up exaggerating some of the information or give out the wrong results in other cases.

As such, consumers are misled. This is a typical example of an area in research that requires the application of ethics. It is, therefore, important that self-imposed ethical standards should be laid down in the research process so as to avoid collection and issue of inaccurate information.

On the same note, it has been noted that some of the marketing tactics are normally designed in ways that exploit the consumers. In this case, the marketers may practice stereotypical presentations that are offensive especially to the minority market segment (Hunt and Vitell 10). These could take the form of questionable or harmful products as well as display of the presentations that demean certain groups of people in terms of race, social class and color just to mention a few.

Marketing Audience

Different products and services in the market normally have their target audience. The target audience can be categorized in terms of ages, gender, race, and social class, among other factors. For instance, a company producing a new variety of sanitary towels will aim at the women as their target audience.

It will, therefore, be offensive to market the sanitary towels to the men since they do not use such commodities. Whenever the public is offended by the way some marketers publicize their products or services, they may demand for the intervention of governing authorities and in extreme cases lead to stopping of the marketing at once. It is in this regard that before the promotional messages are displayed to the public, they have to be screened and tested to ensure that their content is not offensive.

As such, the marketers have the ethical responsibility for editing their content to make sure that it meets the interest of their target audience to avoid being offensive. They should also bear in mind that a group of people in the market who may not be consumers can get offended with their marketing appeals regardless of how hard they try to screen and test their content.

Pricing

Most marketers have the habit of deceiving their consumers concerning the prices of their goods and services during marketing. This is referred to as deceptive pricing.

In this case, the consumers pay high prices while they get low quality products and services. “Deceptive pricing could take the form of misleading selling prices, omission of important terms of sale, false comparison of prices, and offering low prices only when the commodity or service is purchased alongside other purchases” (Ruggiero 107).

In other instances, markers have been noted to offer low prices to poor quality or defective products. This is unethical as it does not allow the buyer to know the condition of the product until the purchase is made.

Among other pricing tools that marketers use to deceive consumers and make them buy low quality products and services at higher prices include price fixing, price wars, price discrimination, and big rigging.

Under big rigging, marketers manipulate the prices of the products or services to look cheap yet in real sense, they are the same as the initial ones or even higher. For instance, some businesses reduce the quality of the product to a minimal percentage but still charge the same price. This is unethical as it makes the consumers believe that they pay for the real quality which is worse than it was.

Advertising and Promotion

Advertising and promotion are one of the key areas in which ethical behavior in marketing is ignored by marketers. Advertising and promotion of goods and services manly involve direct interaction and sending messages concerning specific goods and services to the targeted audience. It is ethical that marketers plan on what is to be conveyed through advertising and promotions. This is because the target audience, which comprises of the consumers, is very sensitive to what is conveyed to them in adverts and promotions. In addition to this, some images that are normally included in advertisements can be offensive to the children, hence crating a very bad picture of the product and company advertising it. It is in this regard that the media companies filter the advertisements such that those that are not appropriate for the children come late in the evening after watershed (Ruggiero 98). Watershed is the name given to the time after 9 p.m. when children are asleep, hence allowing the media to cast programs and advertisements targeted at the adults.

Honesty is another essential ethical behavior, which the marketers are required to possess. There are several cases in which consumers have seen certain products in advertisements and promotions to look enticing, but when they buy the real product from the retail shops, they find that it is of a lower quality.

This happens because the marketers take photos of nicely produced products, or in case of service promotions, they deliver high quality services during the promotions only for consumers to get the favorable for the company’s impression. Marketers normally use this as a way of enticing and attracting consumers with the notion that the products or services are of high quality even when they are not.

Marketers have practiced negative advertising for a long time yet there are the governing authorities, which ought to regulate and curb this behavior. However, even without the intervention of the governing authorities, the markets ought to know that negative advertising is unethical and should be stopped in order to avoid consumer exploitation.

Conclusion

Given the above discussion on ethical behavior in marketing, it can be depicted that it is important that marketers practice ethics when marketing their goods and services. This is because most of the unethical behaviors by marketers normally exploit the consumers by deceiving them stating that they receive quality goods/ services for the price they pay (Ruggiero 107). It is, therefore, important that marketers practice ethics during all the stages of marketing right from market research, pricing to advertising and promotions.

Works Cited

Hunt, Shelby, and Scott Vitell. “A General Theory of Marketing Ethics.” Journal of Macromarketing 6.1(1986): 5-16. Print.

Ruggiero, Violet. Thinking Critically About Ethical Issues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Print.

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