Chapter Nine Marketing Ethics: Advertising and Target Marketing

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Chapter NineMarketing Ethics Advertising and
Target Marketing

• Jerry Estenson

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The Last Two Ps

• Promotion and Placement
• Target Marketing
• Market Research
• Ethical Influence
• Persuading, Asking, Informing, Advising
• Unethical Influence
• Threats, Coercion, Deception, Manipulation, Lying

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Draw the line between Ethical and Unethical
Unethical
Ethical
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Consumer Protection

• Federal Trade Commission
• Focus on effect or intent
• Who judges what might happen
• Political consequences if regulate after harm is
  done
• Do we assume consumers are reasonable or
  relatively ignorant

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Other forms of consumer autonomy

• Over time the market will weed out deceptive ads
  and practices
• Affluent Society (John Kenneth Galbraith)
• Dependence effect Market was creating the
  consumers
• Disrupting supply and demand
• Creating irrational and trivial consumer demands
• Violates consumer autonomy through manipulation
• What would Kant say?

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Possible violations of individual autonomy

• Advertising creates want which are not autonomous
• Why do people shop?
• Non-autonomous desires
• First order (Happen at any given time and
  rational individuals can step away from them)
• Second Order (unable to step back. Like an
  Alcoholic
• Arrington argues that marketing influences us by
  appealing to pre-existing conditions

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• Dworkin To be an autonomous choice it must
  indepedently accepted by the individual
• Crisp Need to know why it is accepted. Gets to
  the capacity of the consumer
• Lippke To be an autonomous decision maker the
  individual must have a variety of intellectual
  skills, discipline, attitudes, and motivations
• Ads carry meta-messages (emotional appeals,
  oversimplification, superficiality, shoddy
  standards of proof.

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Marketing to the vulnerable
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Unique Volunerability

• Consumer (unable to fully participate as an
  informed participant in the marketplace
• General (Susceptible to some physical,
  psychological or financial harm)
• What about target marketing to poor, minority
  groups, accident victims, funeral settings,
  college students.

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