The Moral Dimension of Marketing: Essays on Business Ethics

Citation

Reinecke Flynn, L. (2003), "The Moral Dimension of Marketing: Essays on Business Ethics", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 490-490. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2003.20.5.490.3

The Moral Dimension of Marketing: Essays on Business Ethics is a useful little book in the vein of the Marketing Mistakes series. Davidson follows a format similar to the Mistakes books and provides examples and discussions of ethical dilemmas in marketing contexts.

Following a fine overview of ethics, where he does a good job of explaining the relationship between morality and ethics in terms appropriate to the undergraduate student, the author introduces sections on targeting and each of the four “Ps”. In all of these sections the author presents a number of business scenarios. Davidson then explains his own position on the ethical question he has introduced and gives a basis, often in terms of philosophy, for formulating one’s own position on the issue.

Writing on ethics always includes philosophical terms, but in this book the terms are all explained simply. The student will come away with a better understanding of philosophy as well as business ethics. Included in these chapters are enough examples to weave ethics into all topics in basic marketing.

In addition to the traditional four “Ps” Davidson also includes a section on privacy issues. The first essay in that section, “Is privacy dead?”, does a great job of covering the issues of marketing and privacy in four pages. I think that all marketing students would benefit from this short and clear essay.

The last major section of the book makes it worth the price of admission for any marketing teacher. Davidson calls it “Inappropriate marketing” and it contains ten essays examining the ethical implications of the more sensational cases of questionable marketing tactics. These essays contain wonderful examples that could be used in lectures in various marketing courses. The essay topics include political advertising, excessive student drinking, the controversial Calvin Klein ads, and pornography on the Internet. These topics are all fairly sensational and that will help in selling the ideas associated with them to students. Each of these last essays could form the basis of an engaging class discussion.

In short, D. Kirk Davidson has followed the vignette format made popular in the Marketing Mistakes books to bring us a useful and well written little book that would serve well as a course textbook or as excellent background reading for anyone who teaches undergraduate marketing courses.

For the practitioner, The Moral Dimension of Marketing could be used as a basis for company training. Nearly every short chapter could be used independently as cases for discussion of ethical decision‐making strategies. The book would also serve the practitioner well as a refresher on where ethical dilemmas might crop up in business and how one man, the author, would deal with those dilemmas. Ethics are not only for students.