Ethical and Unethical behaviour taking place in Marketing

         ETHICS

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 behaviour is applicable in the health, businesses, political, and social sectors, among the others.

In marketing, ethical behaviour is applied by ensuring fairness when making moral marketing decisions (Hunt and Vitell 12). Ethical behaviour 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 behaviour in marketing.

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

Ethical behaviour 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 behaviours 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.

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.

mong 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 behaviour 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 behaviour, 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 favourable 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 behaviour. 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.

UNETHICAL MARKETING

Unethical marketing, on the other hand, can send wrong signals about your products and services, destroy your brand’s reputation, and possibly lead to legal problems. This explains why you should avoid them like a plague.

Making false, exaggerated, or unverified claims

In a desperate bid to compel potential and existing customers to buy their products or services, some marketers use false statements, exaggerated benefits, or make unverifiable claims about their offers. This is common in the weight loss industry, where marketers convince potential buyers that a particular product can help them shed so-and-so pounds within two weeks without exercise or dieting!

Distortion of facts to mislead or confuse potential buyers

This is another common unethical marketing practice. A typical example is when a food processing company claims that its products are sugar-free or calorie-free when indeed they contain sugar or calories. Such a company is only trying to mislead potential buyers, since they are unlikely to buy the products if it is made known that they contain sugar or calories.

Concealing dark sides or side effects of products or services

This unethical marketing practice is rife in the natural remedies industry, where most manufacturers deceive potential buyers that their products have no side effects because they are “made from natural products”.

But in reality, most of these products have been found to have side effects, especially when used over a long period. In fact, there’s no product without side effects—it’s just that the side effects might be unknown. It’s better to say, “There are no known side effects” than to say “there are no side effects“.

 Bad-mouthing rival products

Emphasizing the dark sides of your rival’s products in a bid to turn potential customers towards your own products is another common but unethical marketing practice. Rather than resort to this bad strategy, you should emphasize on those aspects that make your offer stand out from the rest of the pack. That’s professional and ethica

Using women as sex symbols for advertising

The rate at which even reputable brands are resorting to this unethical marketing practice is quite alarming. If you observe TV, billboard, and magazine adverts, there’s something common to most of them; a half-naked lady is used to attract attention to the product or service being advertised.

While it might be intuitive to use models in adverts for beauty products and cosmetics, having half-naked models in adverts for generators, heavy machinery, smartphones, and other products not strongly related to women is both nonsensical and unethical.

Plagiarism of marketing messages

Though uncommon, some business owners and salespersons engage in using the exact marketing messages of their competitors to market their own products or services. Creativity is a huge part of marketing, and using other businesses’ marketing messages just passes you off as being creatively bankrupt and fraudulent.

Spamming

Spamming is when you send unsolicited emails to potential customers, encouraging them to buy your products or services. This is the commonest unethical marketing practice done online. The number of time you send such emails doesn’t matter. Whether you send them once, or on occasions, or frequently, you remain a spammer.

  

How to Solve

Have Rules

Organizations need to have predefined rules and regulations regarding workplace ethics. These rules and regulations should be given to new employees together with their employment contract.

Also having the rules written at strategic places at the workplace will also help remind people about the rules. People tend to unconsciously imbibe things they see every day.

Accept Feedback/Complaint

Make it easy for employees to send feedback or complaint in case of harassment, abuse or any other unethical activities going on in the workplace.  

With tools like Formplus, you can create an online forms to receive complaint on workplace harassment or any other unethical behaviours 

List consequences for unethical behaviours

Consequences for unethical behaviours should also be placed alongside the rules at strategic places in the organization. That way, if anyone wants to ignore the rules despite seeing them, the fear of getting punished will stop him or her from going ahead.

Swift Justice/Disciplinary Action

Some Companies often cover up issues of rape, sexual harassment, etc. when the perpetrator is a high ranking member of the organization. Things like this should not be accommodated.

Irrespective of who breaks the rule, there should be swift disciplinary action by the organization.