Ethical Issues In Marketing Research Essay

1. Introduction

Ethical issue refers to a situation or problem that needs an organization or a person to make a choice between alternatives that must be evaluated as right (ethical) or wrong (unethical), good or bad. Hence, ethics in marketing research refers to the moral values or principles that a research company or a researcher that should take into consideration, as the situations of ethical dilemmas often occurs in the marketing research industries. Perhaps, as the utilization of marketing research continues to increase, ethical issues in marketing research also continues to arise. For example, it can be happen in the relationship between the client and researcher, between the research subject and the researcher, and between the marketing

The study basically addressed four research questions: 1.What are the major ethical problems of marketing research? 2 To what extent do our professional codes of conduct address the major ethical problems of marketing researchers? 3. How extensive are the ethical problems of marketing researchers? 4. How effective are the actions of top management in reducing the ethical problems of marketing researchers. As a result, the study of survey indicated the major ethical issue that the marketing researchers has to deal with is believe to be preserving research integrity from practices as misusing research results and statistics. Balancing the interest of both the researchers and organizations with clients was found to be the major conflict that the marketing researchers need to face. The article suggested that fairness to respondents has to be the primary concern. The authors believe the incidence of unethical behavior in the profession was generally low, and the authors also believe that the uses of unethical behavior were not lead to success. The authors also suggested that if top management criticized the use of unethical behaviors will be helpful in reducing the ethical problems. This article provides a clear understanding of what are the major ethical issues and the suggestion to reduce the problems, which is extremely helpful in our study of ethical issues in marketing

The studies give us a better understanding of the definition of ethical issues in marketing research, how it works and the possible ways to reduce it. These three articles show different perspectives on ethical issues in marketing research. The first article explains the ethical issues by using philosophies theories and generated an integrated model when making ethical marketing research decisions by using a combination of many philosophies theories, which believed will be helpful in reducing unethical issues in marketing research industries. The second article shows a result of study which indicates that woman has more ethical morals than man, and it suggest to include more female researchers in the firm which may help to reduce the unethical behaviors in ethical issues of marketing research. The last article indicates that the chances of top managements of organizations to have unethical behaviors are low, therefore it suggested if the top management criticized the immoral behaviors, it will eventually help to decrease the ethical issues in marketing research. In my opinion, all the above mention suggestions can be useful in reducing ethical issues in marketing research. A combination of all three suggestions will be more effective in reducing ethical issues in marketing research. We can include the integrated model in ethical marketing research decision