The recent emergence of the Internet as a growing virtual marketplace has brought with it all the standard ethical dilemmas that face marketers in any other medium. But the nature of the Internet also raises fresh problems or, at least, puts a new spin on old ones. The most prominent additions to marketers' ethical considerations are the exploitation of the direct, often interactive and largely unregulated, access to children offered by the Internet, the gathering of information by market researchers, the ease with which lines between information and advertising are blurred in this medium, and the use of consumer information in combination with new technologies such as e-mail. None of these problems is, in essence, new to marketing ethics, but all of them have gained increased importance because of the nature of the new medium.
Marketing is different from selling and, as Peter Drucker defines it, "the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous," that is, "to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself" (quoted by Nantel and Weeks 9). The emergence of the Internet has provided an unexpected wealth of new possibilities to marketers and the novelty of this situation is the immediate cause of many of the primary ethical problems that arise. As Krauss notes, the upfront costs for Internet consumer research may be higher than those of older methods. But, in the end, "costs for Internet data collection can be 90 percent cheaper [than] traditional telephone random sampling techniques" (Krauss 18). This is primarily because the reach of Internet marketing is so much broader and happens so much more quickly. For telephone surveys "a typical advertising test, concept assessment, conjoint study, volume forecast or pricing evaluation done by a packaged goods provider" might be planned to reach 500 to 1,000 respondents, but on the Net researchers can economically reach 2,000 to 10,...