Ethics In Advertisement Marketing Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

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Ethics in Marketing and Advertising
Introduction
In business ethics means a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. However, ethical marketing is less of a marketing strategy and more of a philosophy that informs all marketing efforts. It seeks to promote honesty, fairness, and responsibility in all advertising. Ethics is a notoriously difficult subject because everyone has subjective judgments about what is “right” and what is “wrong.” For this reason, ethical marketing is not a hard and fast list of rules, but a general set of guidelines to assist companies as they evaluate new marketing strategies.
There are distinct advantages and disadvantages to ethical marketing. Unethical advertising is often just as effective as it is unethical. And since unethical behavior is not necessarily against the law, there are many companies who use unethical advertising to gain a competitive advantage.
On the other hand, ethics in advertising means a set of well-defined principles which govern the ways of communication taking place between the seller and the buyer. Ethics is the most important feature of the advertising industry. Though there are many benefits of advertising but then there are some points which don’t match the ethical norms of advertising.
An ethical ad is the one which doesn’t lie, doesn’t make fake or false claims and is in the limit of decency. Nowadays, ads are more exaggerated and a lot of puffing is used.
The main area of focus for advertisers is to increase their sales and gain more customers, and increase the demand for the product by presenting good decorated, puffed and colorful ads. They claim that their product is the best, having unique qualities than the competitors, more cost effective, and more beneficial. But most of these ads are found to be false, misleading customers and unethical. The best example of these types of ads is the one which shows evening snacks for the kids, they use coloring and gluing to make the product look glossy and attractive to the consumers who are watching the ads on television and convince them to buy the product without giving a second thought.
Ethics in Advertising is proportionately related to the performance of advertising and the nature of advertising. At times exaggerating the ad becomes necessary so as to prove the benefit of the product. For instance a sanitary napkin ad which shows that when the napkin was dropped in a river by some girls, the napkin soaked whole water of the river. Thus, the purpose of advertising was only to inform women about the product quality. Obviously, every woman knows that this cannot practically happen but the ad was accepted. This doesn’t show that the ad was unethical.
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