@Danish Kumar you are right but selling a false promiss while knowing its impossibility is not an unethical act ?

Marketing as a discipline is as unethical as any other field. Ethics is an important element of effective Marketing strategy. However, it has got this image of being unethical because of the practices that you have highlighted in your description.

Like almost anything else, it really depends on the person "doing" marketing and their motivations. Marketing by itself can't be unethical or ethical

Marketing may be unethical a lot of times, but your example appears to be wrong. Companies do not convince people to try fairness creams - it is a need promoted by society, and products are made merely to fulfill these needs.

@Danish Kumar you are right but selling a false promiss while knowing its impossibility is not an unethical act ?

There is a thin line between ethical and unethical Marketing it all depend on us Marketers. Marketers only bring to fore the latent needs of customers and craft services and products that satisfy those needs. In bringing to bear those latent needs we need to be governed by professional ethics and standards and the value we seek to create for our organizations and the consumer. Those who may be looking at short term gains may sound unethical in their approach to positioning but remember this does not create a sustainable business which all marketers and marketing gimmicks, messages etc. are suppose to elevate. Of what use is it to lie when the decerning consumers find out your product or services do not satisfy them after all....

Patrick Amponsah-Frempah , Agreed

Marketing is 50% fact 50% lies.The latter are packaged to look truth .That is what marketing is all about .What kind of marketing people do is influenced by their cultural ,country and industry system at that time and general morality and ethics in society .What salesmen talk is not marketing. They are just front of it. marketing cobweb is spun in back offices where advertising company also join to fabricate illusions and meaningless noise about product or service. When you have nothing to sing about product sing a song. Marketing does not sell products today .They sell dreams,promises and hidden desires. There are serious questions on how marketing is done now a days . All the five Ps or 6Ps .Role of advertising . Even politics is marketed today. Americans salesmen talk too much.Out of 10 minutes crap you find only 1 minute was relevant. germans and japanese talk too less.Marketing should roll out image of an extended product in mind of potential consumers.But basic function is to meet a need in a well designed product that consumer can use and meets her functional criteria.

Mostly consumers especially women find they bought something they did not think about and paid visit to market place for .

Dr. Rajendra K. Gupta

I think you may have mixed up Marketing with Sales.

Marketing is to evangelize the product to the masses; to let them know they need the product, that they want the product. You do not want to lie because it gives a negative slant to your product. You want to tell the truth to your best advantage but never to lie. The consumer advocates will find out about your lies and slime your product to death.

We marketeers let the salesmen do the lying but we can never lie as everything we say or write is very well documented and recorded in the media..

True marketeers find out everything we know of the product, its market and our competitors; the songs we sing makes the market want our product and not that of our competitors. We create the aura for the sales people to do their job, clinch the sale that will pay our salaries.

This is only the opinion of an engineer after turning to the Marketing dark side.

Haji Saediman

Marketing is never neutral; we are paid to do a job and our job is to bring the product we are promoting to the masses and make them want it and we do a great job; many CEO's and EVPs were marketeers in their past.

Marketeers do more than advertisements;

we study the product and its competition,

understand the product's strengths and weakness as well as that of the competition,

win competitions and grow the name of the product in the market,

we study the markets and its constituents or players,

we study the procurement processes, who and how are the products purchased.

We architect the go to market process to support the sales process to bring in the sales or service revenue to pay our salaries. There is no independent organisation to ensure that the employees are paid their salaries.

Advertisements is but one of marketing outputs.

IN BUSINESS ETHICS , WHAT IS UNETHICAL IS SAID TO BE IMMORAL AND ILLEGAL, HOWEVER, IN THE BUSINESS WORLD THE GENERAL PRACTICE OF LYING TO THE CUSTOMERS USING THE MULTIFARIOUS STRATEGIES IN SALES AND IN MARKETING, THE MARKETER OR THE BUSINESSMEN THEMSELVES ARE PROMOTING THEIR PRODUCTS IN A VERY EXAGGERATED WAY IN ORDER TO GET THE PULSE AND THE ATTENTION OF THE CONSUMERS . MANY OF THE BILLBOARDS AND NEWSPAPER ADVERTS ARE SAID TO BE DISTORTED AND EVEN THE CONTENTS ARE NOT REAL. THE GOVERNMENT HAS AN IMPORTANT ROLE TO PLAY ON THIS MALPRACTICES OF MARKETERS. WE SHOULD ONLY TELL WHAT IS IN OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. LET US NOT OVERDO OUR ADVERTS AND MARKETING PARAPHERNALIA. AGAIN , LET US NOT OVERDO IT NOR EXAGGERATE IT.

Dear Perfecto Aquino,

I think you may have mixed up ethics with morality and legality. The dictionary does a better job at the differentiation.

I disagree that in the business world that we have a general practice of lying to customers using marketing. From a marketeer point of view, we do not promote our products in an exaggerated way in order to get the attention of the consumer. We do it in a more subtle way;

-market research to find out what the market wanted,

-study our product to know what it can do and

-prepare a pitch to better direct the market to the product.

Remember Nike’s “Just do it” campaign and Coca Cola’s “We want to make the world a better place” advertisement; both directs the consumer to the product, the product does not claim to help the individual achieve what he wants.

You are right that in many countries, the government and the consumers have established different institutions to bring the miscreants to justice. The consumers can bring the fraudulent advertisers to court and seek compensation for false or misleading advertising.

Let the true marketeers do their job to make the world a more attractive place.

please don't confuse between title of discussion that is ethics in marketing and principles of marketing which are lofty and assuring . I am amused to see some notes trying to teach me marketing functions . That is really funny. Question of Ethics is we have to focus on. i know difference in marketing and sales gentleman.

Marketing is not really an ethical function, because there is a mismatch between the Brand Promise and what the brand actually delivers. To put in other words cheating the customers in a diplomatic way by giving false promise. For example fair ever fairness cream promises that with in a week after applying fair ever their complexion becomes fairer. But in reality it is not so. There are lot of examples in marketing to support that marketing is not an ethical function.

There is a difference between practitioners of the art and the art of Marketing itself.

Many marketeers are employees and they are employed to serve a function, that is to let the world know their products or services.

The example of the fairness cream is a great example, it may not be an effective product and yet the advertisements promised great effectiveness in creating a fair complexion. The product owners had instructed the employed marketeers to create the false impression.The product owners are not promoting their branding; they just want to sell their products. This is quite different from true marketing.

Genuine products and services owners want to maintain and keep their brand image, any deterioration of the brand image may cause them loss of brand value and pricing advantage.

It's unethical to take investors' money to start business without knowing the market.

It's unethical to gouge your customers by overcharging them when you need not be doing so.

It's unethical to employ people when you've not studied the competition and are likely to get put out of business.

It's unethical to excite a team about a product that has no market validation or research behind it to know if the industry well bear it.

Marketing should convey the true facts about the benefits of the product which are the outcomes of years of research. Promising unrealistic benefits at the cost of customers money is unethical. Organizations need to think of providing value- for-money for a sustainable business.Therefore, Marketing should be treated as an ethical function.