Marketing in Society

Social Responsibility and Marketing Ethics

A marketing system should sense, serve, and satisfy consumer needs and improve the quality of consumers lives. In working to meet consumer needs, marketers may take some actions that are not to everyone's liking or benefit. Marketing managers should be aware of the main criticisms of marketing.

Marketing its impact on individual consumer welfare has been criticized for its high prices, deceptive practices, high-pressure selling, shoddy or unsafe products, planned obsolescences, and poor service to disadvantaged consumers. Marketing's impact on society has been criticized for creating false wants and too much materialism, too few social goods, cultural pollution, and too much political power. Critics have also criticized marketing impact on other businesses for harming competitors and reducing competition through acquisitions, practices that create barriers to entry, and unfair competitive marketing practices.

Concerns about the marketing system have led to citizen action movements. Consumerism is an organized social movement intended to strengthen the rights and power of consumers relative to sellers. Alert marketers view it as an opportunity to serve consumers better by providing more consumer information, education, and protection. Environmentalism is an organized social movement seeking to minimize the harm done to the environment and quality of life by marketing practices. The first wave of modern environmentalism was driven by environmental groups and concern consumers, whereas the second wave was driven by government, which passed laws and regulations governing industrial practices that have an impact on the environment. Moving into the 21st century, the first to environmentalism waves are merging into a third and stronger wave in which companies are accepting responsibility for doing no environmental harm. Companies now are adopting policies of environmental sustainability -- developing strategies that both sustain the environment and produce profits for the company.

Social Responsibility

Many companies originally opposed the social movements and laws, but most of them now recognize a need for positive consumer information, education, and protection. Some companies have followed a policy of enlightened marketing, which holds that a company's marketing should support the best long run performance of the marketing system. Enlightened marketing consists of five principles: consumer oriented marketing, innovative marketing, value marketing, sense of mission marketing, and societal marketing.

Ethics in Marketing

Increasingly, companies are responding to the need to provide company policies and guidelines to help their managers deal with questions of marketing ethics. Of course even the best guidelines cannot result all the difficult ethical decisions that individuals and firms must make. But there are some principles among which marketers can choose. One principal states that such issues should be decided by the free market and legal system. A second, and more enlightened principal, puts responsibility not in the system buy in the hands of individual companies and managers. Each firm in marketing manager must work out a philosophy of socially responsible and ethical behavior. Under the societal marketing concept, managers must look beyond what is legal and allowable and develop standards based on personal integrity, corporate consscience, and long-term consumer welfare.

Because business standards and practices very from country to country, the issue of ethics poses special challenges for international marketers. The growing consensus among today's marketers is that it is important to make a commitment to a common set of shared standards worldwide.