Marketing and business ethics

BY PRASANNA Perera

ETHICS is becoming an area of vital importance in business, given the pressures exerted by shareholders. Marketing as a front-line business discipline, has a major responsibility to play in ensuring ethical business practices.

Ethics can be defined as voluntary business practices that are aligned to the core values. Ethics do not in general constitute legal connotations.

Advertising constitutes the most visible form of marketing. Critics of contemporary advertising have suggested that it has become increasingly pervasive and intrusive. Whilst the value of advertising to marketing cannot be disputed, the onus is on carrying out advertising campaigns in an ethical manner.

The major areas of concern is about how women and children are portrayed in advertising. Women should be used in advertising for objectives reasons, based on the nature of the product and target audience characteristics.

Children should also be portrayed in the same light. It is not ethical to get children to endorse commercial brands directly. However, they could endorse generic products.

Many countries rely on self regulation as a means of ensuring "fair play" in marketing and advertising backed up by codes of conduct. Given the public nature of advertising, adherence to codes of conduct tend to be closely monitored by government, social groups and consumer bodies.

A further issue is the question as to who should have the responsibility of drafting codes of marketing ethics. Codes of ethics have tended to focus on areas such as the appropriateness of markets (eg: cigarettes and alcohol to children).

Cause related marketing

Cause related marketing (CRM) incorporates a charitable dimension within an acto of exchange.

There is little doubt that many charities have handsomely benefited from CRM. This has led a number of charities to take a proactive role in persuading firms to make use of CRM.

In general, for CRM campaigns to be successful, the sympathy must be gained of target audiences and causes must be unthreatening. (For example save the children, save the elephants.)

The term "green marketing" is often used interchangeably with "sustainable" or "environmental" marketing. Green marketing is an extremely loose concept. However, five broad approaches to green marketing can be identified.

There is the "fair play" approach, where customers have a right to know what they are getting.

"Fair Play" marketing would, for example, include clear labelling of cosmetic products that are not tested on animals. Secondly, the consumer is seen to be holding certain moral values, which the firm has to be seen to reconcile its activities with in order to gain market share.

Thirdly, that the firm's activities have to be realigned with legitimate stakeholder expectations and needs.

Marketers have to respond proactively to growing evidence of irreversible environmental degradation. "Deep Green" marketing would adopt a minimalist approach in marketing products that were produced in a sustainable and human fashion, an often-cited example being the Body Shop range of cosmetics and ethical issues should become part and parcel of the marketing process. Green marketing would become an implicit assumption underlying any marketing decision.

An important dimension of green marketing is packaging. The need for packaging to be environmental friendly and recycled, is a part-and-parcel of socially responsible marketing.

Marketing ethics vary from country to country and also from business to business. However, the need to be honest and truthful to stakeholder, to be responsible to society and to take care of the environment are all critical areas of marketing ethics.

Basically a business organisation that is aspiring to become successful, must practice sound business and marketing ethics.