False Marketing Controversy

False Marketing

Marketing and advertising to children are still a controversy in the field of ethical acceptability (Clow & Baack, 2015). In fact, reported by Brown (2015), in Australia, McDonald’s was ranked worst by parents for marketing unhealthy food to their children. Similarly, McDonald’s was forced to change their advertising because it focused too much on advertising their Happy Meal Box, which contains high amount of fat, sugar and salt, to children by offering toys accompanied with the meal (O’Reilly, 2015). It is clearly that advertising to children is unethical since Lascu (2013) et al. mentioned that children are not have awareness of persuasive purpose of food marketing, they are entertained by those advertisement and toys, cartoon characters are incentives to influence children’s food preference and

McDonald’s committed virtue ethics repeatedly. The firm did not care for children’s wellbeing while the ethics of virtue holds that “good decisions are made by good people who possess virtues including promoting living well with others and caring for others” (Casali,

This ethics audit would examine McDonald’s CSR based on three areas of concern that a firm typically confronts: responsibilities toward the customers, environment, employees and community (Ebert & Griffin, 2013). In spite of the fact that McDonald’s restaurants in China did not perform well on two essential areas of CSR: nutrition well-being and environmental protection (Xu, 2014), McDonald’s have made lot of efforts in CSR activities in their largest market, the US as well as other locations all over the