A634.5.4.RB - Is Marketing Evil?

 Reflect on how companies can balance the need to win with being ethical. Cite some examples where you felt a company did a great job or a set a poor example for marketing with integrity. As a leader, how will you manage the ethical aspects of marketing/selling something you are working on or trying to get sponsorship for?

            You see this form of ethics being played out all the time in the military, and mostly with non actual combat related stresses and pressures to be the best. Not only does the US military like, want, and need to assert itself as the most powerful military in the world, but also individual units desire to market themselves as such. This creates healthy competition to strive for greatness, but at what cause for whom? Does the community benefit from these pressures? Sometime they do directly as a result from natural disaster or even the current pandemic presence. The community also benefits from this indirectly in the form of security. Now for integrity, the fact that it's embedded in the Army values helps to assert itself well in this arena. Unfortunately soldiers don't always act morally and ethically correct so a level of damage control can be scrutinized in the realm of ethics.

            Some of the more preferred commanders seen in the ranks are terminal (the ones who seek retirement soon). They typically choose to embody a climate of enjoyment versus pressure to perform all the time and also market as such. This creates a potentially less ready force but also one that is highly adaptable because morale is typically at an all time high. Young and ambitious leaders or those who seek legacy are the ones who create the most friction, and desire to pursue a motive that best serves the organization through their agenda. The push/pull of how well a company can balance a vision of being "good" is fickle because of who the beholder is of said good?

            I personally think that military leaders for the most part do a horrible job by promoting strategic vision as one of their own. Folks aren't stupid and this for me is seen as a form of "drinking the kool-aide." I think the best way to get folks to "buy-in" to a vision they first need to understand where it will benefit both the members and the organization, and then secondly where it lacks. Don't just try to cram something down people's throats because it's what the strategist desire, rather massage it so it's best taken from how it beholds potential. Dincer & Dincer (2014) state that "according to these researches, it is clear that marketing ethics of today relates to issues such as trust, honesty and fairness, conflicts of interest, discrimination, privacy, and fraud." They also discuss that as the better the ethical decisions are made internally this tend to result in a better rounded external vision that is also ethical from a marketing perspective.

            Ethical marketing focuses on being well rounded for the community or group. Being seen as a frequent donator to charity, or sponsoring certain events, or even being portrayed with a green peace vision are strategic with respects to targeting the vantage of community wellbeing. You see how Amazon dominates most markets with their vision of easy and friendly customer service approach, for which other businesses like Southwest soon followed. Poor practices are seen all the time from legislators who push frequent green initiatives while flying large emitting personal jets. Others promote giving back to the community though yearly bonuses to all employees that are felt by economy stimulus. Obviously the companies that give back are doing well as an organization if they can sustain these practices, but what does a company do in the short-term to remain ethical and still operate in the red? My question is do companies need to be unethical to get out of the red and then shift to being more ethical when in the black? Or should they stick to a moral and ethical code even if it means they will fold and jobs lost? Is then being ethical to an extreme in-fact unethical?  

            The organization that I recently left made a push to reduce paper products and went to all digital through tablets. This was mainly a push to make data transfer easier but boy did we save insane amounts of money from wasted paper and printing usage. If one unit can do that, then many other soon follow and before you know it the organization can promote these practices in their marketing campaign. This competitive advantage could then be seen by other militaries that follow suit and so on. I think that more well rounded marketing ethics is going to be seen as the next competitive advantage. With how fast our culture desires to cancel anything deemed unethical (substantiated or not) companies need to respect this new wave of vision and best leverage it to serve both the individual and organization, but also the community if able.

References

Dincer, C., & Dincer, B. (2014). An Overview and Analysis of Marketing Ethics. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 4(11), 151-158.

LaFollette, H. (2007).  The Practice of Ethics.  Malden, MA: Blackwell.