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A popularist anti-marketing stance commonly discussed on the
popular literature[4] is that any kind of marketing is inherently evil.
The position is based on the argument that marketing necessarily
commits at least one of three wrongs:

 Damaging personal autonomy. The victim of marketing in this

case is the intended buyer whose right to self-determination is
infringed.
 Causing harm to competitors. Excessively fierce competition
and unethical marketing tactics are especially associated
with saturated markets.
 Manipulating social values. The victim in this case is society as
a whole, or the environment as well..
 Marketing has a major impact on self-images, ability to relate
to one another, and it ruins any knowledge and action that
might help to change that climate.
 Marketing/Advertising creates artificiality.

Marketers have been among the fastest to perceive the market's preference for ethical
companies, often moving faster to take advantage of this shift in consumer taste. This results
in the expropriation of ethics itself as a selling point or a component of a corporate image.

 The Body Shop is an example of a company which marketed itself and its entire product
range solely on an ethical message.


Marketing ethics overlaps with environmental ethics in r espect of waste problems associated
with the packaging of products.


 




Marketing ethics deals with the moral principles behind the operation and regulation of marketing.
Possible fundamental frameworks of analysis for marketing audit are:

Œ
 
 `ethical problems on the basis of the values which they infringe e.g.
honesty, autonomy, privacy, transparency.
£  

 
  , analyzing ethical problems on the basis of whom they affect
e.g. consumers, competitors, society as a whole

£  
 , analyzing ethical problems in terms of the categories used by
marketing specialists e.g. research, price, promotion, placement

Specific issues in marketing ethics:


  : ethical danger points in marketing research include:

` Invasion of privacy

` Stereotyping



 : ethical danger points include

` targeting the vulnerable e.g. children, the elderly

` Excluding potential customers from the market: selective marketing is used to discourage demand
from undesirable market sectors or disenfranchise them altogether.



: list of unethical pricing practice:

` Price fixing

` Price skimming

` Price discrimination

` Price wars

` Bid rigging

` Dumping

Ø 
  
  : ethical pitfall:

` Issues over truth and honesty

` Issues with violence, sex and profanity

` Taste and controversy

` Negative advertising

whether targeted marketing or market research is appropriate. Example: targeting sales of high risk
financial products (e.g. adjustable rate mortgages) to low income individuals.

Whether marketing and selling high health risk products is ethical (e.g. tobacco products, alcohol,
pharmaceuticals, etc.).

Whether marketing that enhances stereotypes is appropriate (e.g. portraying women as the
housekeeper in food and house cleaning advertisements).
O 

 
   
O
 

It was getting too expensive to give the tools away.

We could provide a much better set of tools if people were paying for it.

My vision for the new toolset wasn͛t to just build something better. It was also to solve some of the
problems inherent with online marketing toolsͶproblems that persist even now. They include:

The inability to communicate with each other. Instead, those tools were (and still are) disparate and
incapable of having useful data relationships.

Lack of support for multiple users. There was no easy way to allow team members to conduct and
share their work.

No clouded, shared data storage. They could run basic reports, but the reports weren͛t saved, and
the only way to use the data was to export it to a spreadsheet. (This is still common in some of
today͛s most popular SEO tools.)

Absence of branded, professional reports for clients. Online marketers were forced to export data
from different tools, collect data from their team, and then spend anywhere from a day to a week
piecing together client reports.

When we first started building what is now known as Raven, we knew that, assuming we were
successful, a toolset like this would ultimately be used by our competitors. We would most likely be
in a position of arbitrage, giving our competitors tools to compete with our own services. And while
arbitrage was a financial challenge, there was also an ethical one: The data we were storing from
other companies could technically be used by Sitening to unfairly compete.

The Ethical Dilemma:

The problem of providing both tools and online marketing services has been on my mind since the
beginning of Raven. Even though I knew we would never use that data for our own gain, there are
people and companies who would if put in our shoes. As Raven grew, we started to lock down the
information even more, and also separate it as much as possible from employees who worked on
Sitening services. Later, we decided to split up employees within the company, so that they either
worked on Raven or on Sitening services, but not both. This removed any temptation someone
might get from the pressure to perform.

From time to time, I͛d get email messages from prospective Raven users looking for assurance that
we wouldn͛t use their data for our own gain. While I could promise that we took the privacy of their
data seriously, and that we were a highly ethical company, the elephant in the room was always
Sitening͛s online marketing services.

The End of Services

We͛ve always known that for a company like Siteningʹone committed to running and supporting a
major online marketing software platformʹthe most ethical course of action is not to provide
services that compete with our customers. Unfortunately, this has been no easy task. Sitening, and
more specifically Raven, is funded mostly by the income earned from these services. Everything that
has made Raven possible has come from our own bootstrapping.

Unlike most of our main competitors, we are not VC funded. It has been a struggle both financially
and emotionally, but we have been fortunate enough to have a core team of partners and
employees who have helped make the vision of Raven become a reality. We͛ve also been incredibly
lucky to have professional agencies from around the world take a chance with us. They are the early
adopters of our software, whose patience and guidance have helped make Raven what it is today.

Thanks to Raven͛s explosive growth over the past few months, I͛m proud to announce that Sitening
is now in a financial position to end all of Sitening͛s services. That means we will no longer be
offering anymore online marketing services, and will have our entire staff focused 100 percent on
growing and making Raven even better. We hope this move will instill more trust in us from agencies
that may have been on the fence about storing their data on Raven. We also hope it will show that
we are, as we have always been, committed to privacy, data integrity and ethical business practices.

c
 
 
 
  

The tag line of the ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India) says ͞Regulate yourself, or someone
else will.͟ How true! So many ads with explicit scenes and double meaning words make it an
embarrassment for families to sit and watch the TV together. Yes, it is a fact that advertising
agencies tend to go overboard, when it comes to selling a product. Double meaning words, sexuality,
violence, misleading, false and offensive advertising videos are now a part of our life. For parents
and teachers, the greatest worry pertains to how children will perceive and incorporate the meaning
of these ads in their young minds.

Need for Advertising Code in India

Advertisers should ensure that their ads are not offensive or violating the laws of the land. Ads
should not violate the basic standards of decency, morality and religious beliefs of viewers. In India,
certain ethics must be followed while creating ads.

Legal actions can be taken against advertisements that

  Ridicule caste, race, nationality, colour and creed.
 ´oes against any provision of the Indian Constitution.
 Incite people towards criminal activity, provocative, cause disorder and/or violence in the
country.
 Breach laws and/or glorify obscenity or violence in any form.
 ´lorify terrorism, communal massacres, criminality and so on.
 Ridicule the father of the nation, the national emblem, part of Constitution or the image of a
national leader or a state dignitary.
 Depict women in a deprecating manner. Females should not be portrayed in a manner that
is obscene, exploitative or vulgar.
 Display distasteful visual content that goes beyond the established norms of good taste and
decency.
 Exploit and encourage social evils like child marriage, bride burning and dowry system.

Other Advertising Codes in India

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising methods use
falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truthful facts to deceive the public. This
was stated by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1964.

Here are some more ethics and standards to be followed in advertisements:

1. Permission will not be granted where objects are completely or largely religious or political in
nature. Advertisements cannot be directed towards any religious or political end, or to gain mileage
of any form.

2. Any goods or services that are advertised should not have any defect or deficiencies of any form
declared in the Consumer Protection Act 1986.

3. Products should not be portrayed in a way that misleads the public to infer that the item has some
special, miraculous or a super natural quality, which is anyways difficult to prove.

4. Picture and the audible matter of the advertisement video should not be excessively 'loud'.

5. Advertisement should not endanger the safety of children or produce any sort of perversion or
interest that prompts them to adopt or imitate unhealthy practices.

6. Any type of offensive, indecent, suggestive, vulgar, repulsive themes and/or treatment must be
avoided under all circumstances.

´ood creative advertisement will always attract people͛s attention, but they should have meaningful
visual content. one shouldn͛t have an attitude to play with people͛s sentiments and emotions.

Remember, the golden words of David Ogilvy, the famous Ad ´uru, " A good advertisement is one
which sells the product without drawing attention to itself."