What is an example of an ethical issue that a product/service manager might fact?

• What is ethical marketing?
• What are the main ethical issues in Marketing?
  • Market Research Ethical Problems
  • Ethics in Advertising and Promotion
  • Deceptive Marketing Policies
  • Anti-Competitive Tactics
• What are the consequences of these main ethical marketing issues?
  • Perpetuating Hurtful Stereotypes
  • Using Subliminal Messaging
  • Exploiting Social Paradigms
  • Manipulating Vulnerable Audiences
  • Post-Purchase Dissonance
• In Conclusion

Ethical concerns in marketing develop as a result of disagreements and lack of agreement on certain subjects. Different parties for various marketing transactions have certain expectations about how commercial connections will develop and how certain transactions will be carried out. Each marketing concept raises unique ethical concerns.

For that reason, our marketing team took an opportunity and made this article specifically for you. Let’s uncover the real roots of ethical marketing issues and make them obvious for every single person out there. However, before we tell you all of that, let’s start with the basics.

What is ethical marketing?

Ethical marketing is a term that refers to how businesses sell their products or services not just for the benefit of the customer, but also for the benefit of social and environmental concerns. Its objective is to develop long-term customer-brand partnerships based on common values and objectives.

Additionally, you might conceive of ethical marketing as the application of ethics to the marketing process. Businesses can accomplish this by thoroughly studying marketing challenges via a moral lens. This includes developing transparent and trustworthy marketing campaigns and content, supporting ethically worthwhile causes, and continually making morally correct corporate decisions. Businesses, large or small, that grasp the power of social responsibility cannot only attract clients but also make substantial contributions to society.

What are the main ethical issues in Marketing?

Market Research Ethical Problems

Invasion of privacy and stereotyping are two ethical issues that arise in market research. The latter happens as a result of the fact that any examination of real target audience groups requires approximations and grouping of individuals. However, if stereotyping is used carelessly, it can result in a range of ethically questionable outcomes.

Ethics in Advertising and Promotion

As an example, in the early years of businesses’ existence, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, tobacco was promoted as a product that promoted health. As of right now, the law has deemed an advertisement that does not adhere to ethical norms to be a moral violator. So, as we can see, the things that everyone is working on in the old marketing time, now do not seem valid whatsoever. For that reason, here are a few tips that unveil a much bigger picture.

• When it comes to ethical concerns over commercial content, sexuality is a key source of contention. Violence is also a significant ethical concern in advertising, particularly in cases when the content should not be viewed by children.
• Certain sorts of advertising may insult certain groups of people even while they are highly relevant to others. Female hygiene items, as well as hemorrhoid and constipation medications, serve as excellent examples. While condom commercials are critical for AIDS prevention, they are occasionally viewed by some as a means of promoting promiscuity, which is fiercely forbidden in certain societies.
• A negative advertising policy enables the marketer to emphasize numerous shortcomings of competitors’ products rather than emphasizing the inherent benefits of their own products or services. Political advertising is rife with such policies.

Deceptive Marketing Policies

Deceptive marketing policies are not limited to a certain market segment or demographic, and they frequently go unnoticed by the public. There are several false marketing techniques. It can be delivered to consumers in a variety of ways; one of them is through the use of humor. Humor provides an escape or comfort from a variety of human limits, and some advertisers may use this by utilizing misleading advertising strategies to promote a product that may hurt or alleviate the constraints.

Anti-Competitive Tactics

Numerous strategies are anti-competitive. For instance, bait and switch is a sort of fraud in which clients are “baited” with advertisements for low-cost items or services; however, the promised good is unavailable in reality, and the customers are “switched” to a more expensive product that was not intended in the commercials.

Planned obsolescence is another form of anti-competitive policy. It is a technique for developing a product with a finite useful life. After a particular amount of time, it will become obsolete or out of style, allowing the consumer to acquire another product.

Additionally, a pyramid scheme is an anti-competitive procedure. It is a non-sustainable business strategy that offers participants payment or services in exchange for enrolling others; it does not provide real investment opportunities or sell items or services to the general market. This type of business approach requires the first investor or “captain” to recruit further members for a price, who in turn recruit additional members to be compensated by the company.

What are the consequences of these main ethical marketing issues?

Perpetuating Hurtful Stereotypes

Marketing efforts frequently represent specific groups in traditional positions, such as washing powder advertising depicting women as housewives busy with laundry, or do-it-yourself advertisements that rarely depict anybody other than men as “handy.” Additionally, while much commercial marketing creates the stereotyped idea that possessing an excess of belongings will result in fulfillment and pleasure, the underlying message is that the consumer will be excluded from the happy group if he does not purchase the product.

Using Subliminal Messaging

Subliminal messages embedded in marketing materials are used to alter the consumer’s thinking. Subliminal advertising may be prohibited depending on how it is conducted. Advertisers can deliver positive subliminal signals that do not violate ethical boundaries by utilizing pleasant imagery, familiar music, and other messages that make consumers feel good. Learning how to employ subliminal messaging effectively while adhering to ethical guidelines can help you raise your sales.

Exploiting Social Paradigms

Certain groups may find certain forms of marketing offensive due to cultural and ethnic sensitivity. For instance, advertising for a luxury car that portrays the driver as a man capable of charming an attractive woman conveys several potentially offensive societal remarks. These include the notion that a woman is exclusively concerned with financial success, the notion that a guy requires a luxury car to attract the woman of his dreams, and the promise that if the customer purchases such a car, he would instantly become desirable.

Manipulating Vulnerable Audiences

Similar to how the inclusion of racial or ethnic groups in advertising might serve to stereotype them, the exclusion of these groups from marketing in a multiethnic society can result in image and identity issues for those who are excluded. Marketing to children, in particular, has the potential of exposing ethical issues in marketing. The marketing of fast food and unhealthy snacks to children may cause them to refuse to eat anything else, resulting in childhood obesity.

Post-Purchase Dissonance

Often, what you see is not what you receive. Post-purchase dissonance arises when a buyer purchases anything by mail order and discovers that the quality falls short of his expectations upon receipt of the products. He can typically return the merchandise for a refund, but the marketer is banking on the fact that returning the item and incurring postal and insurance costs would deter purchasers.

In Conclusion

Ethical marketing should be built on a foundation of trust with a business’s customers. This can be accomplished in the following ways:

• Transparency – Businesses may earn their customers’ trust by being transparent about their manufacturing, employment, and environmental practices.
• Social awareness – To succeed in ethical marketing, a business must demonstrate a strong commitment to a certain social or environmental concern.
• Agent of change – Identifying a cause is only the beginning. Successful ethical marketing requires a company to demonstrate tangible effort and change to its customers—through data, narrative, and persistent outreach.

Customers are more inclined to support a business when they believe in its commercial decisions, can identify with its moral ideals, and witness tangible good deeds done in the world. And that’s just only the basics of ethical marketing issues and their prevention on practice. However, let’s say you are completely new to marketing and you don’t know a thing, how exactly can you find a partner who can assist you with it? Furthermore, how will you know where and why your startup product should be developed according to the correct development principles (that do include marketing aspects too)?

If you have stumbled across such a thing, then our service is just for you. For the past 10 years, the JetRuby team has developed a specific product development technology, called a Product Development Strategy. Which is a first step towards the construction of your potential MVP. During this free business consultation, our experts will produce a general plan covering the future product development life cycle and an action plan with high-level features. So, if you are an entrepreneur who is looking for a correct methodology and wants to understand his project development process, then leave us your project description. We’ll contact you within 24 hours after our experts receive your inquiry.

What is the role of ethics in product/service management?

Which condition in product or service management is unethical?

Is it ethical to market products that might be harmful to consumers?

Which of these is not an ethical issue in marketing?