Ethics. It is how humans decide right from wrong, "usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues" (Velasquez). It can even be used to justify unethical actions. In the case of advertising and marketing, ethics plays a large role in creating the selling points to make a product or an idea profitable. As evident in Ethan Watters ' "Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan", ethics is the sugar coating many corporations use in their advertising and marketing strategies which is evident in their unethical pushing of Japanese marketing laws, advertisements where they attempt to maximize the marketable audience, and how their product does not work because in reality all they care about is the money.
Watters …show more content…
They convinced themselves it would be worth pushing through loopholes in the Japanese drug approval process as well as the "direct-to-consumer advertising rules" (Watters 525) unethically, in order to get the drug to the Japanese people earlier. Of course not twelve years earlier because there had not been the possibility of money involved at that time.
The drug companies insisted that their ethical reason to cure the world of depression was worth unethically pushing through loopholes in the Japanese advertising rules. Such loopholes included using the Internet to circumvent the "direct-to-consumer advertising rules" as well as fabricating "patient advocacy groups that were actually created by the drug companies themselves" (Watters 525). Another instance where the "direct-to-consumer advertising rule" was bypassed was in the trial stages where the drug makers would "often [buy] full page ads in newspapers in the guise of recruiting test subjects" (Watters …show more content…
The ethical sugar coating had been enough for GlaxoSmithKline to make billions off of a drug that does not even have a proven scientific result. This happened because they "offered grants to sponsor research on their drugs" and only kept "those researchers who produced results favorable to the drugs" while at the same time dismissing any contradictory evidence (Watters 527). Then they proceeded to market the fact that they have had renowned researchers and scientists to test and prove that their drug does work. This method left a lot of room for biased
Watters …show more content…
They convinced themselves it would be worth pushing through loopholes in the Japanese drug approval process as well as the "direct-to-consumer advertising rules" (Watters 525) unethically, in order to get the drug to the Japanese people earlier. Of course not twelve years earlier because there had not been the possibility of money involved at that time.
The drug companies insisted that their ethical reason to cure the world of depression was worth unethically pushing through loopholes in the Japanese advertising rules. Such loopholes included using the Internet to circumvent the "direct-to-consumer advertising rules" as well as fabricating "patient advocacy groups that were actually created by the drug companies themselves" (Watters 525). Another instance where the "direct-to-consumer advertising rule" was bypassed was in the trial stages where the drug makers would "often [buy] full page ads in newspapers in the guise of recruiting test subjects" (Watters …show more content…
The ethical sugar coating had been enough for GlaxoSmithKline to make billions off of a drug that does not even have a proven scientific result. This happened because they "offered grants to sponsor research on their drugs" and only kept "those researchers who produced results favorable to the drugs" while at the same time dismissing any contradictory evidence (Watters 527). Then they proceeded to market the fact that they have had renowned researchers and scientists to test and prove that their drug does work. This method left a lot of room for biased