Marketing Ethics

Ethics is sometimes used as an artificial concept to gain a competitive advantage. The question to examine involves the circumstances that make business people and business institutions act in unethical-ways. What are the underlying circumstances or market environments in which firms try to use "'ethics" as nothing more than a marketing tool to gain advantage over their competitors?

As an artificial business concept, ethics is not the domain of illegal or 'gray area" firms operating at the fringes of the marketplace. On the contrary, every segment of business activity uses ethics in this manner, regardless of financial or market circumstances (Sethi, 1994, p. 804). Often the same firm that is co=ended for donating money to a charity on Monday might have one of its subsidiaries or divisions hauled into court to pay a pollution fine on Tuesday.

While efficient markets may prompt firms to act smart, they do not nec

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reasingly see themselves and their profession as a professional service industry. They see marketing prohibitions not in an ethical light but as restraint of trade, thereby helping the older firms retain an artificial competitive edge. The software-industry shares something with the legal industry. The law is as old as civilization, but the consumeroriented commercial software industry has been in existence fewer than 30 years. However, like the large established law firms, the larger software firms with markets to protect have begun to establish ethical guidelines for their industry. At the beginning of the decade, industry giants such as Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, and Lotus (now owned by IBM) formed the Software Business Practices Council. The purpose of this council is to reform what its members call widespread, misleading, and sometimes unethical marketing and accounting practices. These practices ""adversely affect the credibility and health of our industry," a council statement says ("'Software Firms", 1990, October 10, p. Bl). If industry product announcements and launch dates, financial data, and marketing sales plans were to remain credible with consumers, the larger firms believed an industry code of ethics was nee
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Approximate Word count = 2175
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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