When
it comes to marketing it may seem that ethics are thrown out the window, after
all, their job is to convince you that you need
to buy their product. However El Sayed and Ghazaly (n.d.) raised
a good question “Is it even about
satisfying the customer, or does it also involve totally materialistic
objectives?” What is the main goal of
marketing? Is it to offer the customer what they want/need or is it to sell
what you have? In a perfect world, it
would be the perfect combination of both, your company would create and market
the perfect item that people would want or need. This is rarely the case.
Ethics play a role in
marketing in that they may limit the ways a company advertises a product and
the promises it makes about the product.
Where it may be ethically wrong to outright lie about the quality or
function of the product, it seems to be expectable to mislead the consumer a
bit about the amazingness of a product.
There seems to be a fine line between honesty and marketing. A company needs to find a way to balance the
need to market and sell with honesty and ethics. This is not an easy task, in fact as El Sayed and Ghazaly (n.d.)
stated “making the consumer
want the product and then influencing him to stay loyal to it is definitely not
an easy job to do”. The best way to keep
customers is to produce a great product and have great customer service. Advertising and marketing will draw customers
in but quality and customer service will keep them.
In today’s world of
technology, it seems that everything one does online is tracked and used for
marketing. Is this unethical or just a
fact of life lived online? With
technology moving faster by the day it is not surprising that companies are
watching your habits in hopes to sell you a new and better product. It does not seem unethical any more than
companies who once bought addresses for advertising mailings. Companies are constantly looking for ways to
show their products to consumers, and online is currently the quickest and
easiest way to do so.
As a leader I would
advise my marketing team to advertise all the positive attributes of the
product without crossing the line of lying or misleading. Making a quality product is the first step
and when this happens the marketer’s job is that much easier. When this is followed up with helpful
customer service it is a combination for success. The trick is to convince the audience that
they want or need your product and then convince them that it is worth the
price you are asking if this is done ethically then those customers are most
likely to return later.
El Sayed, H., & El Ghazaly, I. (n.d.). Is Marketing
Evil?Marketing Viewed as a tool. Retrieved
June 30, 2016, from
http://www.ethicsbasedmarketing.net/2.html
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