Thursday, May 15, 2008

The concept of Ethical Brand Positioning

Marketing has been a more frequent target of criticism for unethical business activities than any other functional area of business. As marketing involves more direct contact with high public visibility than the other functional areas, it remains in the focus for unethical practices. In the past decades, increasing amount of attention has been devoted to ethics in business in general and marketing in particular. Marketing managers have become ethically more sensitive, and they are largely convinced that customers and the public expect them to act in a morally acceptable way.

Given fierce competition and rising costs of customer acquisition, enduring relationships based on mutual trust have become more important than ever before. Marketers have developed the idea of strong brand so as to reassure the consumer about the quality and delivery of value. Consequently, the relevance of ethics in Branding has surged over the last three decades.

In this thesis, after exploring various aspects of ethics it is taken as a “one word” to describe complex interdependence of culture, religion, society, and business, these interdependence results in various undisclosed but yet very evident set of patterns and behaviors in the society. These behaviours and patterns of the society results in the judgmental aspect of something as acceptable or unacceptable, a brand, which identifies these acceptable, reference points and positions itself on them is able to outclass the competitors and also wins the market. Even more attention has recently been paid to ethical issues in the multicultural marketing context. Essentially, the cross-cultural perspective of value-compatibility has become important over the past years.......
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