Sales and marketing is the epitome of product or service delivery since it is not only how the product is portrayed to the consumer, but also how it eventually reaches the clientele. For this reason, expectations are that advertising, which is a big part of sales and marketing, offers a true representation of the product or service being offered. Using Tibor Machan’s article ‘Advertising: The Whole or Only Some of the Truth,’ this paper will discuss Machan’s take on truth, while also offering opinion on whether there is truth in his arguments.
According to Machan’s article, advertising does have the ethical obligation to tell clients the truth, but not necessarily everything about the product. He argues that the buyer is looking for something, and the seller is also looking to make a sale. Therefore, the seller is obligated to provide the buyer with any information that they require to make that sale. However, the seller or merchant has ‘rational self interest’ in not seeking to help the buyer in information gathering without this having to be unethical. Under circumstances where the buyer is seeking a lot of information about a product, the seller does not commit any moral wrong by deflecting questions or answering in part as a way to avoid lying to the client.
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I wholly agree with Machan’s arguments that there is no moral obligation for the seller to share all the information with the buyer, provided that they do not directly lie to the client as a way of getting a sale. This is because it is up to the client to know what they want, and to do their own research on the best product, its features and the best sellers, while it is the responsibility of the seller to make a sale albeit without intentionally deceiving the buyer.
References
Machan, T. R. (1987). Advertising: The Whole or Only Some of the Truth?. Public Affairs Quarterly , 1 (4), 59-71.
