Marketing Ethics and Communication Strategy in the Case of Enron Fraud

Abstract

Ethical discussion in marketing is still in its nascent stage. Marketing Ethics came of age only as late as 1990s. As it is the case with business ethics in general, marketing ethics too is approached from ethical perspectives of virtue, deontology, consequentialism, pragmatism, and also from relativist positions. However, there are extremely few articles published from the perspective of twentieth or twenty-first century philosophy of ethics. One impediment in defining marketing ethics is the difficulty of pointing out the agency responsible for the practice of ethics. Competition, rivalry among the firms, lack of autonomy of the persons at different levels of marketing hierarchy, nature of the products marketed, nature of the persons to whom products are marketed, the profit margin claimed, and everything relating the marketing field does make the agency of a marketing person just a cog in the wheel. Deprived of agency, the hierarchy of marketing hardly lets one with an opportunity to autonomously decide to be ethical. Without one having agency, one is deprived of the ethical choices.