A good marketing sense, with the corporate bottom line in mind, is still the single most important motivation for the application of ethics in marketing. Marketing ethics has come to mean the concern over the three major stakeholders in the conduct of business: the company, the industry, and society. These three groups have logically different and differing needs and wants. Out of these differences, ethical conflicts arise. However, the inescapable fact remains that ethics plays an important role in the relationship between a company and the public.

Ethics in marketing can result in positive company reputation and image, as well as positive customer impression of the company and its products and services. The ethical marketer knows too well that unethical marketing practices can only lead to bad company reputation and image, bad publicity, dissatisfied customers, lack of consumer trust and confidence, and loss of business or even legal action in the extreme.

A sensible marketer will want to avoid the pitfalls of unethical marketing. Ethical abuses result in pressure from government watchdogs and social concern groups. Marketing irresponsibility will only be meted with negative controversy that can very well backfire on the business organization. Consumer interest groups, professional associations, and self-regulatory groups exist precisely to exert influence towards the full practice of ethics in marketing.

Consumers have heard about corporate social responsibility (CSR) that seems to embody the essence of ethics in the conduct of business. CSR, promulgated and implemented by the human resources of a company, can very well be the umbrella over all ethical functions of a business organization that considers all stakeholders. The institutionalization of corporate social responsibility within the corporate structure, and as eventually translated to marketing, is associated with the changing personal values of individual managers, as individuals can make a difference (Hemingway and Maclagan, 2004). The marketing discipline has a major contribution to CSR as it can undertake actions congruent to the organizational and stakeholder desired norms of ethics (Maignan and Ferrell, 2004).

Good corporate citizenship should be the foremost ethical consideration in formulating and implementing marketing strategies. This should be the other bottom line, aside from profits. The underlying factors are truth, honesty, fairness, and transparency. The ethical marketer will promote an ethical product that, in turn, will make an ethical consumer. The marketing strategist should be responsible in implementing ethics down the line, as he or she has the power and influence to sway consumer behavior. While general norms and standards in society determine if a product is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it is the ethical marketer that initially made him or her think so.

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Via CSRwire