Marketing Ethics

The Right and the Good

In the modern marketing, marketing strategy has become a critical step of the survival and development of the enterprise. However, marketing ethics also become a major contradiction between corporate and social responsibility. Therefore, this article mainly expressed that corporate marketing activities need to base on moral categories, and companies should assume their social responsibility.

First of all, Ferrell (2013) indicated that in marketing activities, marketing ethics is responsible for adjusting the relationship between business and society. Including marketing value orientation, ethical norms and social responsibility, and the most fundamental principles of marketing ethics is to maintain the healthy development of society (P119). In the realistic society, some business activities are legal, but immoral and lasting impact on society, such as in enterprise production, whether the raw materials will damage to the environment. Therefore, before fulfilling corporate ethics, companies need to take up their social responsibility. Because when enterprises to fulfill their social responsibility, companies will standardize related business activities. In particular, in the management of many companies have developed a formal specification of what behavior in terms of marketing management is moral and immoral, and these guidelines can be called ethical conduct.

There will focuses on marketing ethics in the two cases are a moral dilemma and immoral. For example, whether to allow tobacco companies to advertise? If they are allowed to advertise, then people will have to face the intrusion of unhealthy products. However, if not, it will interfere with freedom of speech and business capacity, which is a moral dilemma (Moore, 2006). Thus, ethical dilemma is a complicated problem, because this problem involves the enterprise itself the rights and interests of other organizations. Another is immoral, such as false advertising and marketing staff deliberately mislead consumers.

Furthermore, in modern marketing, business and society should know how to judge and solve the problem of marketing ethics. In the book of ‘The Right and the Good’ mentioned that the enterprise has social responsibility, including significant responsibility and prima facie duty. In order to conduct the ethical marketing, enterprises must have a sense of social responsibility, and using their obligations to regulate the behavior of enterprise marketing (Ross, 2002). Thereby, ethical marketing is essential for maintaining the relationship between society and business.

In addition, for the enterprise, how to develop ethical marketing has become an important element in the contemporary marketing strategy. The fundamental principle of morality is fairness, honesty and credibility. Therefore, companies should unifies own actual Situation to develop ethical codes of conduct, and use these to monitor business practices and employee behavior. Admittedly, law can monitor and sanction the violations of enterprise. However, the law is difficult to judge the moral issues of right and wrong. Thus, need to establish a mechanism to safeguard consumer rights and interests, to deal with the relationship between business and society, such as the independent consumer-rights organizations.

Overall, enterprises to cultivate customer loyalty on the premise that we must strengthen the marketing ethics, create and deliver valuable products or services to consumers, rather than just use marketing means.