Unethical Practices In Marketing Essay

Ethics reaches every area of both life and business including marketing and finance. Whenever a decision must be made that can affect other people one needs to ask is this the ethical choice, or is it centered in self-interest. Marketing ethics are an area of applied ethics which deals with the moral principles behind the operation and regulation of marketing. Unethical Practices in Marketing take many forms, some better known to the public than others. An experienced marketing professional uses many tactics to get the attention of the desired audience, including ones that cross ethical boundaries. First we will explore some of the most used unethical marketing practices used today, including making false, or overstated statements in an attempt …show more content…
Marketers also conceal side effects of products by placing them in fine print so small that you would need a telescope to read them or simply forgetting to disclose them at all. While many companies compare their products to those of a competitor some cross into the unethical practice of bad mouthing competing products. One area of marketing that many feel is unethical, although a large portion of companies do it is exploiting woman as sex symbols in advertising to get the attention of potential customers even when it has nothing to do with the product being advertised. An approach that I recently came across while attending a timeshare type tour in exchange for a couple days of cheap hotel stay is the fear tactic, in which they tell you things like it’s a limited-time or one-time offer. If you don’t buy now, the price will go up, or in my case if you don’t buy today then you are not eligible for the VIP points program. The reason for making such statements is to put the buyer on the spot, forcing them to make a decision on the spot. In exploitive marketing companies charge more than the actual value of a product or service. To be within the ethical boundaries of …show more content…
I often wondered about how this could possibly be regulated when you have company heads that receive a large portion of their compensation package as stock options and should know the general performance of the company even before financial statements are released. I would think they have a distinct advantage as to the price per share they sell their options. Sometimes professional duty can conflict with company demands. People if the financial sector of most businesses are placed under a tremendous amount of pressure to meet projections or quotas in order to move up or even stay employed by the company. Individual responsibility can also fade under the demands of the client, nothings worse than feeling like you are failing, honestly at anything, this has caused many honest men down the wrong path in order to fulfill the need to succeed. Then there are times when one’s own self-interest sometimes changes into greed and selfishness this person often times views his unethical choices as a onetime thing, but once they get started greed pushes them to take more and more. Unfortunately this has cause wide spread fear and dislike for some of the financial sector, how do you trust your hard