Marketing Ethics

In today’s world, the competitive pressure in business makes marketers to seek for new ways to reach customers. The advanced technology provides businesses the chance to gather, store and analyze customer’s personal information to the unprecedented depth. When used properly, customer information allows companies to target different groups and offer personalized service. But many consumers now feel the threat of their privacy.

Amazon.com is one of such companies which have patented technology aiming at tracking customer information. These tracking devices can monitor a user’s interest including recency, frequency and duration of his visit to a particular web. Amazon has collected very detailed information about what customers buy, wanted to buy, browsed, recommended to others, even wished others to buy for them. Amazon has also launched a web search engine that can remember everything a customer has searched for. Using such information, Amazon send special advertisement to the certain customer’s e-mail regarding the items he paid the most attention to. It also directs searches toward products it thinks the certain customer is most likely to buy. Amazon believes such information gathering is the best way to build customer loyalty and to win the competition. (St. Cloud Times, 2006)

In short-run, Amazon may increase its sales to some extent using this method. However, more and more consumers are concerned with the safety of their personal data now and feel that their information may be shared to other parties. In the entire process, the customer’s permission is never asked for. They even don’t know what information has been collected and how it is used.

An organization has several stakeholders and it is expected that the managers can balance the interests of different stakeholders. However, in reality they tend to maximize shareholder value at the price of customer interest. Marketers may only focus on the achievement of financial goals and market in some ways...