Jueep Marketing Ethics

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Julep, a popular beauty subscription company, has been accused and ultimately fined for taking part in deceptive marketing practices. As a company, one should take their customers into account and make sure that they are aware of what they are signing up for. They did the wrong thing by misleading their customers into enrolling in their subscription plan without proper disclosure of the terms. Deceptive marketing is unethical because a business should treat their customers as part of their company and not just as their means for profit.
Deceptive marketing is when any form of advertising or promotion misrepresents the nature of a product or service. These types of techniques can include bait and switch pricing, when a company advertises a …show more content…

This argument basically states that a company should act in the way that they want to be portrayed (Freeman 51). If they want to keep their customers loyal then they should treat them with fairness. Julep was not thinking about their character when they were causing their customers such a difficult time. They did not disclose significant issues to their customers and that’s what makes it so unfair and unethical of them. Freeman states that “By making ethics explicit and building it into the basic way we think about business, we avoid a situation of bad faith and self deception” (Freeman 51). Clearly Julep was not thinking about this when they were charging their customers for something that they did not want to sign up for. They did not integrate ethics into their company’s actions. A customer wants to be able to trust the companies that they do business with. Using deceptive marketing damages the image customers have of these companies. They purposely did not disclose something that the customer should know and so many customers lost that idea that the company was about doing the right …show more content…

I believe that the ethical thing to do would be to properly show what someone is signing up for without them having to read the “fine print”. There is no need to be misleading if a company knows how to build loyalty with their actions. Julep did not adequately disclose all of the details of their plans when a customer was signing up for their free box and that’s what makes their actions so deceiving. They used the word “free” to hook their customers into going onto their website when free doesn’t really mean free. It’s something that we see all over the place because free is just a word that shows enormous appeal to customers. This attracts people into checking what these products are but companies don’t show the full story. They just lure customers into their businesses with the promise of something free of charge. This is unfair to customers because they have the belief that they are getting something and in the end, can accumulate many hidden charges that they would have never incurred if they didn’t fall for these claims. Adding onto Juleps misleading claims, some customers even stated that they did not receive their box. They also had trouble cancelling their subscription after they had already been charged and many were even denied the chance of a refund. They had to dispute the charge with their banks (King). This only adds to the wrongness of the company’s doing. Businesses put honesty aside

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