A lot can be said about a company by looking at the ethics they follow. Behaviors like utilizing misleading advertisement, bad mouthing competitors, emotional exploitation will make a company look less desirable compared to its competitors. It is up to managers to work hard to prevent this types of behaviors from occurring at the workplace. Misleading advertisement On the American Marketing Association (AMA) Statement of Ethics, under the Ethics Values section, it states that marketers should “Offer products of value that do what we claim in our communications.” () DeVry Education Group Inc. failed to follow this values. DeVry had claimed that 90 percent of their graduates got a job within six months of graduation. However, this percentage …show more content…
One way businesses can do this is through emotional advertising. Contently journalist Carly Miller (2016) stated how it was proven that emotion drives our actions more than cognitive thinking (par. 1). This is one of the reasons that emotional advertising is so successful for companies. While it is not unethical to use this piece of information, how it is can be. An example given was a commercial by Novartis, a pharmaceutical company. The commercial features a man sitting in an armchair, unaware that his house is flooding and water is rising. A voice says “With heart failure, danger is always on the rise.” It then proceeds to say how many people with heart failure die within five years of being diagnosed. The response to the commercial was not what was expected. Many felt threatened and manipulate to buy the product, making trusting the company hard for customers (Miller, 206). As manager, not gaining customers trust is the opposite from what we want. High-pressure can also damage a company's relationship with long-term customers (Armstrong & Kotler, 2015). Having lower-level employees give their honest opinion on the company’s commercial before it is launched could help prevent this