The meanings of ethics in and of advertising

Abstract

Advertising presents special difficulties for business ethicists. Ads are trivial entertainments, yet advertising culture has been held up as a metaphor for a general moral degradation in the post‐modern epoch. Ads confuse us since they are a new and unfamiliar form of communicative discourse which we find difficult to place in an ethical category. This, mainly conceptual, paper attempts to explore how ethics in and of advertising may be subject to examination within a broadly social constructionist perspective. The paper sketches out a view of social constructionism which draws significantly on the ‘turn to language’ in psychology. It then attempts to discuss how ads might work, or rather, as the paper suggests, how ads mean. The social constructionist view point entails a rejection of cognitivist schemes of advertising psychology in favour of a mutualist framework within which ads and consumers jointly construct meanings which are essentially indeterminate. This ontological perspective has implications for ethical treatments of the field. The notion of meaning making as a psychological principle leads the discussion into an initial consideration of how normative approaches to advertising ethics might be framed. The self regulatory system obtaining in the UK is offered as an appropriate example. An underlying theme of the paper is that discussions of ethics in relation to advertising cannot rest upon a simplistic cognitivist notion of how ads ‘work’ upon consumers’ minds. The paper tries to show that a broadly social constructionist approach may offer a richer scheme for examining advertising ethics in its local, mediated, indeterminate and socially constructed character.

Is it worth it to be unethical? Consumers’ attitudes toward personalized commercial e-mails

“…Needless to say, this unethical image that consumers have of the companies is not helpful for marketing. 45,46 The question that this study raises, then, is how advertisers can convey personalized e-mails to consumers without creating a negative image. Owing to the invention of recent technologies, we now have numerous ways to develop databases that provide personalized consumer information.…”

“…A more negative implication to advertisers was that consumers ' negative feelings could be linked to the fact that consumers did not like the brand and had no intention to purchase that brand advertised in the future. 45,46 In other words, sending personalized e-mails might negatively infl uence the company ' s sales. Therefore, the results of poorly structured personalized e-mails will not cause a zero effect, but rather a minus effect.…”

Ethik im Marketing: Themen, Entwicklungen und Perspektiven

“…B. Brenkert 1998;Foley 1998;Hackley 1999;Laczniak 1998;Murphy 1998;Phillips 1997;Zinkhan 1994). Neben der allgemeinen Diskussion um ethische Standards in der Werbung werden auch kontroverse Themen erörtert.…”

An ethical evaluation of product placement: a deceptive practice?

“…To be more precise, ethical evaluation of a marketing method requires some kind of definition or broad agreement as to what the method entails. With respect to a communication-based marketing method, there needs to be some kind of agreement on what the communication contains, always difficult given the polysemic character of advertising in general (Hackley 1999). Where such agreement is not possible, ethical evaluation cannot proceed, unless the very lack of agreement results in the communication being deemed deceitful.…”