Patrick E. Murphy

Consumer Online Privacy: Legal and Ethical Issues

Consumer privacy is a public policy issue that has received substantial attention over the last thirty years. The phenomenal growth of the Internet has spawned several new concerns about protecting the privacy of consumers. The authors examine both historical and conceptual analyses of privacy and discuss domestic and international regulatory and self-regulatory approaches to confronting privacy issues on the Internet. The authors also review ethical theories that apply to consumer privacy and offer specific suggestions for corporate ethical policy and public policy as well as a research agenda.

Normative Perspectives for Ethical and Socially Responsible Marketing

This article presents a normative set of recommendations for elevating the practice of marketing ethics. The approach is grounded in seven essential perspectives involving multiple aspirational dimensions implicit in ethical marketing. More important, each basic perspective (BP), while singularly useful, is also integrated with the other observations as well as grounded in the extant ethics literature. This combination of BPs, adhering to the tenets of normative theory postulation, generates a connective, holistic approach that addresses some of the major factors marketing managers should consider if they desire to conduct their marketing campaigns with the highest levels of ethics and social responsibility.

An ethical basis for relationship marketing: a virtue ethics perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an ethical foundation for relationship marketing using a virtue ethics approach.Design/methodology/approach – The approach is a conceptual one providing a background on relationship marketing from both American and European perspectives. Earlier studies published in EJM on relationship marketing are featured in a table.Findings – The proposed ethical relationship marketing approach has three stages (establishing, sustaining and reinforcing) that are paired with specific virtues (trust, commitment and diligence). These and other facilitating virtues are shown in a figure.Researchlimitations/implications – The model and its components have yet to be tested empirically. Some strategies for undertaking such research are discussed.Practical implications – Several European and American companies that currently practice ethical relationship marketing are discussed.Originality/value – Although relationship marketing has been studied for a number of years by many s...

The Current State of Advertising Ethics: Industry and Academic Perspectives

Given the dynamic change and radical transformation of the advertising industry, we interviewed industry and academic leaders to seek their perspectives on the current state of advertising ethics. We also analyzed advertising agency Web sites, reviewed advertising textbooks, and surveyed the academic literature. We distinguish the ethics of the advertising message from the ethics of the advertising agency business. New and perplexing ethical issues related to advertising messages have emerged with the advent and growth of new and nontraditional media. Because of the more complex organizational structures of global communication agency networks, the temptations, risks, and rewards of unethical behavior in the business of advertising are greater than ever. We recommend that both industry and academia become more proactive, individually and in consultation with one another, in dealing with ethical problems and in setting norms.

Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective

This essay is inspired by the ideas and research examined in the special section on “Stakeholder Marketing” of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing in 2010. The authors argue that stakeholder marketing is slowly coalescing with the broader thinking that has occurred in the stakeholder management and ethics literature streams during the past quarter century. However, the predominant view of stakeholders that many marketers advocate is still primarily pragmatic and company centric. The position advanced herein is that stronger forms of stakeholder marketing that reflect more normative, macro/societal, and network-focused orientations are necessary. The authors briefly explain and justify these characteristics in the context of the growing “prosociety” and “proenvironment” perspectives—orientations that are also in keeping with the public policy focus of this journal. Under the “hard form” of stakeholder theory, which the authors endorse, marketing managers must realize that serving stakeholders sometimes requires sacrificing maximum profits to mitigate outcomes that would inflict major damage on other stakeholders, especially society.

Distributive Justice: Pressing Questions, Emerging Directions, and the Promise of Rawlsian Analysis

DJ has an ethics component because it concerns the fairness of allocations; such adjudications always involve inherently moral judgments (Laczniak 1999). In fact, the American Marketing Association Statement of Norms and Values lists fairness as one of six ethical values for marketers. For example, even when the transactions between a large retailer and consumers are overwhelmingly positive and satisfying, members of the supply chain may have been unfairly exploited as a by-product of that system. For instance, some have claimed—perhaps too stridently—that while “big box” retailers are advantageous for large numbers of consumers, some of these benefits have come at the disproportionate expense of small suppliers and familyowned retail competitors (Fishman 2003). While big box retailing is clearly a net economic plus, this occurrence may have happened due to a flaw in the distributional system that did not fairly compensate all the players in the value chain. Such DJ questions are germane to the moral responsibility of marketing. In articulating what they consider to be the major normative perspectives of ethical marketing, Laczniak and Murphy (2006) portray the principle of DJ as one of the fundamental ethical tenets to be considered when evaluating the social dimensions of marketing practices. DJ also has a public policy component because inequities (i.e., benefits and burdens) resulting from “unfair” marketing practices are often remedied by legal regulation (Gundlach, Block, and Wilkie 2007; Gundlach and Murphy 1993). The Federal Trade Commission adopted the fairness doctrine some years ago to promote more ethical advertising. For instance, while marketers have the right to gather information from consenting parties via the Internet, their ability is markedly restricted when it comes to gathering information from minors owing to the Children’s On-line Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. Day and Montgomery Over the years, the concept of distributive justice (DJ) has consistently been defined as addressing how a community treats its members in terms of the assignments of benefits and burdens according to some standard of fairness (Johnson 1956; Jackson 2005). Unlike other aggregate concepts used in social economics and macromarketing (e.g., Quality of Life or living wage) that have dynamically shifted definitions depending on time and place, our understanding of the core meaning of DJ has remained remarkably stable. Despite the definitional stability, as we learn below, this situation does not mean that arriving at a consensus about whether DJ has been attained in specific business situations is simplistic or uncontroversial. Indeed, as we shall see, quite the opposite seems to be the case. From our initial definition above, it follows that DJ applied to marketing deals with how the marketing system, in terms of its structure, policies, or practices, fairly apportions rewards and penalties among the various parties affected by the market exchange process. Examples of topical issues with DJ implications that come to mind are: (1) the treatment of suppliers and consumers when marketers establish footholds in emerging markets, (2) the seeming lack of leverage for subprime borrowers when they try to purchase a home or automobile, and (3) the proportionate awards going to migrant farm workers who are employed in the agribusiness supply chain. As globalization of the economy inevitably expands further and business targets more impoverished market segments, the concerns of DJ will only become more critical. Of course, no definition of a particular social concept exists in a vacuum. A further consideration in any analysis of DJ in a marketing context is that it is tethered in clear connection to major streams of the marketing literature, especially ethics, public policy, and macromarketing. Together these research connections create a “distributive justice nexus” worth noting because these highlighted areas of the marketing literature can shed insight on DJ questions. This nexus is summarized in Figure 1 and is now discussed briefly.

Observations on Teaching Marketing Ethics

This paper focuses on one approach to teaching a course on marketing ethics. The objectives, structure, cases, readings, videos and websites for such a course are all examined in depth. Several never published cases dealing with marketing ethics topics are discussed. A case analysis decision model is proposed as a vehicle for resolving ethical issues that surface in these cases. The fact that marketing ethics is a valuable course for both MBA and undergraduate marketing students is emphasized throughout the discussion.

Marketing academics at the FTC: the inside story

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to present an inside look at the history of a little‐known but interesting initiative in the marketing field, one that involved the infusion of marketing thought into public policy decision‐making in the USA. It aims to trace the interesting tale of how marketing academics came to be included in the activities of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) through the FTCs “Marketing Academic Consultancy Program” (MACP) during the 1970s. This story also aims to include descriptions of the contributions made by those marketing academics and how those scholars were later phased out of the FTC.Design/methodology/approach – An autobiographical approach is used since each of the authors was personally involved in the MACP. As participants in the program and as scholars whose careers were thereafter tremendously affected by that participation, these personal accounts provide considerable insight into the impact on both FTC operations and on marketing academic thought itself.F...