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Ethical MarketingTweet

Ethical marketing is about whether a firms marketing decision is morally right or wrong. The morality of the marketing decision can encompass any part of marketing from advertising to the pricing of their product or service, to the sourcing of their raw materials.

In today’s corporate world ethical marketing is playing a larger role in marketing strategy. An increasing number of consumers are buying products/services because they feel that the products, services or organisations responsible for those are ethical. In response to this consumer demand organisations have increased their focus on ethical marketing. The UK Co-operative bank is good example of an organisation that tries to follow a ethical principal, based on what the customers feel strong about.

When companies are reviewing marketing strategies they need to consider whether the marketing decisions that they are making are ethical and reflect consumer and market expectations.

An individual’s view of ethics and morality is influenced by a variety of things including their culture, background, experience, upbringing/family, peers, community, religion and country.

After a company has decided to implement ethical marketing they will need to make the following decisions:

1. Define what is ethical.
2. Which branch of ethics will they subscribe to.
3. How will the ethical approach to marketing be implemented.
4. In which areas of the firm’s operations should ethical marketing be implemented e.g. employees, suppliers, consumers/clients, production techniques, distribution or the whole value chain.

The question of ethical is whether the firms decisions is right or wrong. A number of questions a firm must ask itself include:

Should the firm employ children to their products? Do the firm’s suppliers use child labour? Does the firm know? Today, child labour is a very big issue, does your firm want to associate itself with this?

Does the firm exaggerate the benefits of its products on its packaging? Are claims overstated? Many firms do make bold claims. The company needs to make sure these claims are fully supported.

Does the firm conduct in high pressurized selling techniques or focus on customer groups that are vulnerable e.g. pensioners? With markets very competitive obtaining customer loyalty is becoming very difficult. High pressurized selling techniques could result in the firms loosing reputation within its market.

Does the firm squeeze even more margins out of their supplier to the extent that it impacts on the suppliers’ profit margin and may well have an impact on the quality of the products sold to you? Many supermarkets have been accused of such a practice. The introduction of the fair trade policy does much to deal with this.

Ethical marketing is based around making the right moral decisions. Balancing ethics and remaining competitive can be difficult. You can argue that as consumer attitudes shift having an ethical strategy will make a firm more competitive.

Environmental marketing does stem from ethical marketing, however environmental marketing is slowly becoming so big it does deserve to be looked at separately.