Essay Sample on Marketing: Legal & Ethical Issues in a Data-Driven World

The concept of marketing has been in existence since the start of commercial trading. However, in the recent past, it has become more and more of an area of high contention involving legal and ethical issues which appears to be more dubious and ill-defined. Various questions have been raised by the players in the market comprising of the blurred line that exists between the modes of collecting data and the use of these data collected, which often involve privacy inversion.

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Often, the marketers make use of the data they have at hand to attract customers and come up with deceptive advertisement without looking into the aspect of privacy of their customers. Thus, businesses ought to be careful while making use of the data they have at hand to tread on the right side of the existing thin line between what is legal and what is illegal in the business world. This paper focuses on some existing Social, Ethical, and Legal Implications in the market and what businesses need to do to overcome them.

The socially responsible marketing involves taking moral actions that often encourages positive impacts in every individual involved in the company operations such as the community, consumers, employees, and shareholders. In every organization, marketers are often tasked with the responsibility of packaging and communicating the decisions of an organization that is focused on impacting the various communities they interact with.

The consumers who are the target audience of the marketing schemes by organizations have the rights as well as the power to decide on the companies which they deem fit to fail or succeed. Thus, marketers are tasked with a major responsibility of ensuring they get into philanthropic practices that do not make them phony.

The practices undertaken by the marketers involve data collection as a key stage in the marketing process. Collection of extensive data often allows the businesses to choose most optimal techniques for them to use in marketing for their consumer base. The tech giants such as Google and Facebook have resorted to tracking the web history of their users to generate returns (Story, Castanheira & Hartig, 2016).

Despite these practices by these organizations, lawmakers are yet to decide on the legal positions of such actions. Their inability to arrive at a concrete decision has prompted the consumers to push for tougher privacy laws aimed at their favor. In this regard, companies such as Facebook have been on the limelight in recent past over privacy issues. Thus, every business involved in the collection of data from their customer base ought to become more conscious of the privacy of these consumers.

Businesses use various channels to collect consumer data for their marketing needs. Some of the techniques that have been implemented by businesses include door to door sales, telemarketing, social media marketing, and the use of unsolicited emails (Lipschultz, 2017). Various countries have different laws that impose restrictions on the appropriate time for undertaking some of these controversial modes of marketing.

These laws have been applicable mostly for the door to door marketing and telemarketing which need to be undertaken between 9 am to 6 pm and stickers at the doors informing the marketers not to knock or call ought to be obeyed. With such protections in place, legal and ethical issues often come up due to the ignorance of the consumers on the existence of such law leading to failures to report such offenses making the marketers get away with their unethical and illegal behaviors.

Countries such as Australia have imposed anti-spam laws which require the businesses to have the receivers consent before sending out the emails. The mails must also identify the sender and must contain the unsubscribe facility. However, the existing bottleneck in their antispam laws is the definition of consent which must be expressly stated or inferred from existing situations.

Thus, marketers ought to deviate from the norms such as the misleading claims that have been common in the advertisements to avoid possible implications. The most used claims by the marketers revolve around the product quality, exclusion of goods, and the availability of a service (Story, Castanheira & Hartig, 2016). Claims such as the use of a picture of a jet for a motorcycle transport company or any other contradicting advert that is misleading and illegal may always lead to unwanted social, ethical, and legal implications.

As a result of these misleading claims, companies such as Spec Savers and Harvey Norman have been found liable and charged. Nonetheless, the major problem often arises due to the difficulty of claiming a misleading advertisement. Consumers implicating such misleading adverts must always have substantial evidence to register and support their claims.

Therefore, marketers working in various industries ought to be aware of the damages that may arise to their reputations as well as that of their parent organizations in cases of misinformation through the various channels of marketing (Lipschultz, 2017). For this reason, any promotional material used in advertisements should give accurate information about the features of the product in question to retain the loyalty of their customers.

References

Lipschultz, J. H. (2017). Social media communication: Concepts, practices, data, law and ethics. Routledge.

Story, J., Castanheira, F., & Hartig, S. (2016). Corporate social responsibility and organizational attractiveness: implications for talent management. Social Responsibility Journal, 12(3), 484-505.