The Marigold Inn located in Augusta, Georgia noticed that guests preferred pizza delivery to the hotel’s room service. The hotel noticed a loss of profits in their room service operation because of this. The hotel tried to serve pizza, but it was not as popular as they hoped. After an improvement in taste, Sharon Coombs, the Restaurant and Food Services Manager, decided to create a fake company, “Napoli Pizza” to try to increase sales for the hotel. The hotel would market Napoli Pizza as an authentic Italian pizza company, stock guests’ rooms with brochures, and deliver the pizza in Napoli Pizza attire, but the pizza was really just the hotel’s room service pizza.
There are multiple ethical issues that are present in this case. One ethical
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In this situation, Marigold Inn is bluffing and knows the rules to the poker game, but the guests do not know the rules and do not know they are being fooled. The Napoli Pizza scheme is violating many ethical values that the American Marketing Association emphasizes. The AMA says to “embrace ethical values,” and the ethical values that are being violated are honesty, transparency, and fairness. Honesty is being violated because Marigold Inn does not demonstrate truthfulness or offer products that claim to do what they do. Marigold claims to have “authentic Italian pizza from old, family recipes,” and this is not true. Also, transparency is being violated because they are not attempting to communicate clearly with their guests as evident by setting up fake brochures and creating a fake company. Another AMA ethical value that is being violated is fairness. The AMA website says that the ethical value of fairness means to, “represent products in a clear way in selling, advertising and other forms of communication; this includes the avoidance of false, misleading and deceptive promotion.” The entire idea behind Napoli Pizza violates this ethical value because they are falsely promoting a product with a fictitious company. The other two