MARKETING STRATEGIES AND ETHICS

Marketing Strategies and Ethics

Marketing Strategies and Ethics

Introduction

Corporate communications strategists in areas of marketing and public relations are tasked with the challenge of finding innovative and effective ways to communicate organizational messages to accomplish a variety of objectives. Often, one of those objectives is developing strategies to support an increase in market share. In the headlong lurch into creative strategy in message formulation and dissemination, the operational considerations tend to take precedence over ethical considerations. Indeed, the literature is rife with exhortations that support this contention (Cui and Choudhury, 2003; Gershon, 2003; Rotfeld, 2005). The more creative the strategy, it seems, the more assiduous the strategist needs to be in considering the potential ethical implications before implementation. The key to considering the ethical implications of strategies and tactics is to be able to identify when their existence in the first instance.

An example of such a creative communications strategy is the case of what is referred to by marketers as disease branding, a marketing communication strategy that relies on the tactic of creating or exaggerating a disease with the objective of effectively enlarging the market. This approach to increasing market share in the pharmaceutical industry focuses not on the traditional approach of highlighting a product; rather it “sells” to the consumer the idea that there is a new disease to be concerned about, or a new way of looking at an old disease, and that he or she might actually suffer from that disease. The actual drug product is secondary in the messaging although primary in the subsequent sale. The product is then not the brand that is recognized by the consumer; the disease is.

Using disease branding as an illustrative case, this paper applies the “Five Pillars of Ethics in Public Communication” to illustrate the pitfalls of ignoring such an ethical analysis and to argue that such an analysis ought to be an integral part of strategy development in all areas of corporate communication.

The context

When Edward Bernays, the putative father of modern North American public relations practice, “fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and social causes” (Ewen, 1996, p. 3), he accomplished two enduring outcomes. First, he used what we now recognize as a typical public relations strategy to market a product. The second outcome, arguably even more important, was the fact that he was able to take a product, in this case cigarettes, and effectively enlarge the market to include everyone. He also opened the door to corporate communication practitioners whose creativity might begin to overstep ethical boundaries.

He accomplished this in 1929 by staging what appeared to be a spontaneous Easter parade of New York City women doing something that up until then was considered socially unacceptable: they strolled down Fifth Avenue smoking in public. The lack of spontaneity aside - he had hired these women to pose as debutantes and then enticed media attention from all over the world - he accomplished a goal that many businesses aspire to ...