Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Marketing raises some of the most widely and hotly disputed ethical issues regarding business. Whether it be advertising, retailing, pricing, marketing research, or promotion (to name just a few marketing areas), marketing has been charged with engaging in practices that involve dishonesty, manipulation, invasion of privacy, creating unsafe products, as well as the exploitation of children and vulnerable consumers. Two general studies which refer to these (and other) criticisms of marketing are John Tsalikis and David J. Fritzsche (1989) and Bol et al. (1991) . It should be noted that, in the preparation of this chapter, I have drawn primarily on articles and books which are to be found within the “marketing ethics” literature. This means that there are numerous other articles and books outside of marketing (so defined), which have implications, both direct and indirect, for the topics and issues discussed here on which I did not draw. I adopted this approach to give yet a further sense of the state of marketing ethics itself today. Whether this limitation best serves the topics discussed, the reader must decide for him or herself. However, because some sort of marketing activities are necessary in any society beyond the most undeveloped, the elimination of marketing is not the answer to the problems listed above. Rather, we must look to the formulation and implementation of ... log in or subscribe to read full text