Marketing

Managerial and Public Attitudes toward Ethics in Marketing

Research

By its very nature, the practice of marketing often presents ethical dilemmas. In addition, marketing professionals are often near the bottom in terms of ethical conduct and honesty ratings (Nussbaum 2002). Within the broader discipline of marketing, marketing research has been cited as one of the most troubling in this regard (Lund 2001). Discussions about the ethicality of various marketing research tactics and the misuse of research data are often in the news (Phillips 2010). Marketing research process has also been dramatically affected by changes in the technology used by marketing researchers for data collection.

One common theme that emerged from this analysis was that the presence of a code of ethics seems to increase the individual’s disapproval of unethical behavior and also its importance to the respondent. Another consistent finding is that respondents working in firms with a written code of ethics tend to believe that unethical behavior happens less frequently

The results for perceived frequency of occurrence of unethical conduct showed that two personal factors, age and income, had a significant impact on how respondents assessed the occurrence of unethical conduct in real life. As respondents’ age and income increased, their assessment regarding the frequency of occurrence declined.

Prior research on gender differences in ethical perceptions has found that women are generally more likely to see business practices as unethical compared to men. Major point of difference between marketing professionals and the general public is in the area of the expressed disapproval of unethical marketing research practices. Surprisingly, and with a couple of important exceptions, the general public is more tolerant of such conduct (as indicated by lower disapproval ratings) compared to the marketing professionals.

This study extends our understanding of how managers, researchers,...