Marketing is an activity carried out by human beings with the goal of meeting or satisfying the wants and needs via the process transacting. Therefore, the main aim of marketing is satisfying the consumer or customer. There have been a debate on how marketing aims at meeting customer needs and wants and at the same time, its morality is questionable (Vassilikopoulou, Siomkos & Rouvaki, 2008). There exist ethics of marketing hence ethical and unethical marketing being discussed.
Ethical marketing is responsible for informing all the efforts of marketing. It promotes fairness, honesty and responsibility during marketing or advertising. Everybody has their view on what is wrong and right thus making ethics a difficult issue. Ethical marketing provides rules that govern companies and businesses. These rules include; marketing professional should abide by their personal ethics, advertising is different from news and entertainment, transparency in marketing, maintain consumer privacy, comply by rules and regulations, marketers must be fair and marketing ethics should be thoroughly discussed when making decisions on marketing (Ethical Marketing, 2012).
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Unethical marketing is a way of using manipulative and exaggerated information for the purpose of convincing the consumer into buying the product. In addition, the product or service will not satisfy the customer. Unethical marketing is the main reason behind the failure experienced in most companies or businesses because consumers do not want to feel manipulated. They want to develop trust towards the brands they like or use. It is very difficult to decide whether a company is ethical or unethical because they might be ethical in one aspect of marketing and unethical in the other. An example is when companies advertise soaps. They use models that have perfect skin as a result of using the soap. In the real sense, they have used tricks to hide the imperfections that might exist on the model. In this case, there is ethical and unethical marketing (Al-Kubati, 2012).
References
Al-Kubati, G. (2012). Ethical and Unethical Marketing. Retrieved March 30, 2017 from https://www.slideshare.net/Al-Kubati_92/ethical-unethical-marketing
Ethical Marketing. (2012). Retrieved March 30, 2017 from http://www.marketing-schools.org/types-of-marketing/ethical-marketing.html
Vassilikopoulou, A., Siomkos, G. & Rouvaki, C. (2008). The Ethical and Unethical Dimensions of Marketing. Management Review: An International Journal . 3(2): 49-61
