From serving customers' needs, marketing, as a discipline, has acquired unethical shades. Which are the unethical actions common in marketing and what are the reasons for these?
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Thanks to the recent controversies involving Enron, WorldCom, and Shell, the public face of corporate entities is marred with questions about their business practices. Sustained fudging of the accounts at Enron and collusion of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, led to their collapse but their trail has shaken people's faith in corporate practices. WorldCom's inflated earnings were exposed and fraud cases initiated against the erstwhile US telecom giant. Shell admitted recently to overstating its Reserve Replacement Ratio (RRR) by as much as 20% (3.9 billion barrels of oil).
In the Indian context, there has been no dearth of questionable business practices: Coca-Cola and Pepsi were found to be selling soft drinks with higher than permitted levels of pesticide residues; Cadbury got embroiled in selling chocolate packs infested with worms; and Amul was caught putting post-dated labels on its butter packs. |
