ETHICS IN

MARKETING
OPERATIONS
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

MARKETING ETHICS
Marketing ethics was approached from ethical perspectives of virtue or
virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, pragmatism and relativism.
Ethics in marketing deals with the principles, values and/or ideals by
which marketers (and marketing institutions) ought to act.
Marketing ethics is also contested terrain, beyond the previously
described issue of potential conflicts between profitability and other
concerns
Ethical marketing issues include
marketing redundant or dangerous products/services, transparency about
environmental risks, transparency about product ingredients such as
genetically modified organisms possible health risks, financial risks,
security risks, etc. respect for consumer privacy and autonomy,
advertising truthfulness and fairness in pricing & distribution.

 Marketing ethics involves pricing practices, including illegal actions such as

price fixing and legal actions including price discrimination and price
skimming.

Certain promotional activities have drawn fire, including green washing, bait
and switch, shilling, viral marketing, spam (electronic), pyramid schemes
and multi-level marketing.

Advertising has raised objections about attack ads, subliminal messages,

sex in advertising and marketing in schools.

Marketing Ethics case study: Complan Vs Horlicks:

Comparative Advertising
This case is about the advertising war between two popular health drink brands
Horlicks and Complan in India. The war for supremacy between these two brands
started as early as in 1960s and had continued ever since. Over the years, the
brands were involved in aggressive comparative advertising in print and television
over attributes such as ingredients, protein content, growth, and flavors. However,
in late 2008, the makers of Horlicks, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare (GSK),
and the makers of Complan, Heinz India (Heinz), came out with advertisements that
directly compared the brands using the competitor brand's trademarks.
In September 2008, Heinz moved the Bombay High Court objecting to
advertisements of Horlicks which highlighted the nutritional content and price gap
between the two brands, and showed Horlicks as a better and more inexpensive
health drink than Complan.
The advertisement showed the competitor brand clearly while making the
comparison. Heinz later followed up with its own ad comparing Horlicks unfavorably
with Complan. This prompted GSK to file a case in the Delhi High Court in December
2008 claiming that the ad released by Heinz disparaged its brand by calling it low
priced, and thereby damaging its reputation.

ETHICS IN OPERATIONS
This area of business ethics usually deals with the duties of a company to ensure that
products and production processes do not needlessly cause harm. Since few goods and
services can be produced and consumed with zero risk, determining the ethical course
can be problematic.
Ethics in production is a subset of business ethic that is meant to ensure that the
production function or activities are not damaging to the consumer or the society
There are ethical problems arising out of use of new technologies that are deleterious
to health, safety and environment. Technological advancements like genetically
modified food, radiations from mobile phones, medical equipment etc are less
problems are more of dilemmas.
Defective services and products or products those are innately deleterious like alcohol,
tobacco, fast motor vehicles, warfare, chemical manufacturing etc.

 Animal testing and their rights or use of economically or socially deprived people for
testing or experimentation is another area of production ethics.
Ethics of transactions between the organization and the environment that lead to
pollution, global warming, increase in water toxicity and diminishing natural
resources.

Operations Ethics case

study
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy

In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, a poisonous grey cloud (forty tons of
toxic gases) from Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL's)1 pesticide plant at Bhopal
spread throughout the city. Water carrying catalytic material had entered Methyl
Isocyanides (MIC) storage tank No. 610. What followed was a nightmare.
The killer gas spread through the city, sending residents scurrying through the dark
streets. No alarm ever sounded a warning and no evacuation plan was prepared. When
victims arrived at hospitals breathless and blind, doctors did not know how to treat
them, as UCIL had not provided emergency information.
It was only when the sun rose the next morning that the magnitude of the devastation
was clear. Dead bodies of humans and animals blocked the streets, leaves turned
black, the smell of burning chili peppers lingered in the air. Estimates suggested that
as many as 10,000 may have died immediately and 30,000 to 50,000 were too ill to
ever return to their jobs.

 The catastrophe raised some serious ethical issues. The pesticide factory was built in the
midst of densely populated settlements. UCIL chose to store and produce MIC, one of the
most deadly chemicals (permitted exposure levels in USA and Britain are 0.02 parts per
million), in an area where nearly 120,000 people lived.
The MIC plant was not designed to handle a runaway reaction. When the uncontrolled
reaction started, MIC was flowing through the scrubber (meant to neutralize MIC emissions)
at more than 200 times its designed capacity.
MIC in the tank was filled to 87% of its capacity while the maximum permissible was 50%.
MIC was not stored at zero degree centigrade as prescribed and the refrigeration and
cooling systems had been shut down five months before the disaster, as part of UCC's
global economy drive.
Vital gauges and indicators in the MIC tank were defective. The flare tower meant to burn
off MIC emissions was under repair at the time of the disaster and the scrubber contained
no caustic soda.

 As part of UCC's drive to cut costs, the work force in the Bhopal factory was
brought down by half from 1980 to 1984. This had serious consequences on
safety and maintenance. The size of the work crew for the MIC plant was cut in
half from twelve to six workers. The maintenance supervisor position had been
eliminated and there was no maintenance supervisor. The period of safetytraining to workers in the MIC plant was brought down from 6 months to 15 days.

Ethics in Information
Technology
Businesses today are technology and innovation driven. There is huge
competition in the sphere and therefore like other industry or business
function ethics is essential here also. Specially because ethics by itself is
only a tool to create and doesnt know ethics or morals!
In technology we speak of ethics in two contexts; one is whether the pace
of technological innovation is benefiting the humankind or not, the other is
either severely empowering people while choking others for the same.
In the first case we are compelled to think about the pace at which
technology is progressing. There are manifold implications here, be it
things like computer security or viruses, Trojans, spams that invade the
privacy of people or the fact the technology is promoting consumerism.

 Intellectual property refers to patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade

secrets, all of which are legal means meant to protect unique ideas,
inventions, and other non-tangible property.
Patents grant inventors exclusive rights over their works, and usually apply
to inventions (such as machines), processes (such as a way to synthesize a
chemical) and substances (such as a new form of plastic). The patent holder
has the right to determine who may produce, use, or sell his invention,
process, or substance.
A trademark is a mark, typically stamped on a product, to indicate its
producer. The producer has control only over the mark, not over any
features of the product. Examples of a trademark are the Nike symbol and
the McDonald's golden arches.

 Copyrights protect ways of expressing ideas. As the name suggests, the

copyright holder has a right to determine who may copy his words. The right
does not extend to who may discuss the ideas expressed by those words. For
instance, Einstein may copyright his essay on the theory of relativity, but he
may not prevent others from researching his theory or presenting it in their
own words. In recent years, copyright has been extended to cover not only
books and journal articles, but also pictures, films, music, computer programs,
and design elements of products.
A Trade Secret is information a firm reserves for its exclusive use, or for use
by other firms to which it grants a license, such as the recipe for Coca-Cola.
Trade secrets share some similarities with patents, but they differ in one
meaningful way. Patents are only granted for a set length of time (currently 17
years), while trade secrets can be kept indefinitely.

Case study on Intellectual property

rights
1. A&M Record Inc v Napster Inc
. In 2000, one of the most famous cases in intellectual property law was taken to
the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9 Circuit, when a group of major record labels took on
Napster, Inc. The music file-sharing company, setup by then 18-year old
Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning and his partner Sean Parker,
was a revolutionary piece of sharing software, which allowed users to share any
number of music files online. At its peak the software had around 20 million
users sharing files peer-to-peer.
. A&M Records, along with a list of 17 other companies and subsidiaries accused
Napster of copyright infringement, for allowing users to search and download
MP3 files from other users computers. Rock band, Metallica and hip hop star Dr
Dre also filed separate cases against the sharing software company. These
cases led to a federal judge in San Francisco ordering Napster to close its free
file-sharing capacities. After the judges decision, the company eventually
declared bankruptcy before re-emerging as a paid online music service, while
German Media Corporation Bertelsmann AG ended up paying $130 million in
damages to the National Music Publisher Association, after propping Napster up
during its financial decline.