Business Ethics, 2nd Edition

Chapter Fourteen

Marketing Ethics*

INTRODUCTION

It is said that a salesman, an important role-player in the marketing of goods and services, helps create them and plays a pivotal role in reaching them to the ultimate consumers. They say, with a certain degree of exaggeration, that a good salesman knows how to sell refrigerators to Eskimos by practising the art of sophistry. A salesman may not have a decisive role in a market where the buyers are well informed and there is a surplus of goods and sources to choose from. But in scarcity-driven markets persons who know the art of marketing only will know how to promote their products. But it is also important to emphasize here how this is done without taking the consumers for a ride. This chapter ...