- Ethical Issues
Failure to identify ethical problem in the marketing structure of the product can result to conflicts and disagreement between the business and the targeted market. Ethical issues that are affecting the Naturally Pita Cracker product can be categorized into six marketing ethics (Moon, 2001). These ethics include market research, market audience, pricing and advertising and promotion.
- Market research
Some ethical challenges in the market research occur when privacy and stereotyping are involved in the marketing structure. This occurs when real population analysis is conducted on a basis of making approximations and placing consumers into different groups. If the market research is not conducted in an ethical manner, it can result into various undesirable results to the company.
- Market audience
Ethic dangers that are faced in this category includes excluding potential customers from the market due to their status. Regarding the target market of the Naturally Pita Cracker, women may discriminate due to their conditions such as obese, plus-size market and ethnic minority. Therefore, the market strategist in the company has to be very keen on these issues for the betterment of the better customer relations (Kotler, 1986).
- Pricing
There are various unethical pricing practices that may be faced by the Naturally Pita Cracker. These practices involves price skimming, price fixing, price discrimination, predatory pricing, variable pricing, price war, supra competitive pricing and dumping (Moon, 2001). The pricing strategy has to be innovative to avoid this practices that may lead to undesirable ethical results in the company.
- Advertising and Promotion
The company must not conduct the misleading advertisement on their products. This is because the advertiser who does conduct misleading advertisement is not only offending against morality but also law. For example, in the fast food industry, many products are advertised as promoting health while majority of the products leads to unhealthy conditions such as obesity (Prestoungrange, 1974).
- Legal issues
There are many legal issues that a company has to aware of when setting it its marketing operations. These legal issues if not handled in a strategic manner can result to a bad company reputation. Problems that are associated with the legal issues occur where the marketing communication messages are found to be incomplete, false, misleading, false and unfair. In California, there are regulation bodies that the company must comply with to be considered healthy in the marketing (Flynn, 2006).
Some of the key issues that may affect the Naturally Pita Cracker product include copyright issues, terms and conditions, and health issues. The Conrad Bakers company must ensure that it has maintained its copyright in all piece of their work compliance to the copyright body in California. Issues surrounding copyright involves infringing any company’s copyrighting by applying their content, images or materials without prior agreement (Flynn, 2006). The company must also establish a well-defined terms and conditions to their clients and stick to them. The company must also exercise in a healthy business that should be recognized by the health body in California. This will help to ensure that the company is offering products and services that are healthy to human consumption, women in particular.
- Social issues
In order for the marketers to be effective with their products, they do not just sell products and services but must be very attentive of their responsiveness and actions in addressing social issues. This is because customers have a tendency of liking the company that show genuine concern and quality of workforce on their products (Fine, 1981). The main social issues in the marketing occur in three main categories, support, relationship and global perspective.
- Support
In order to enhance the role of the social responsibility, the Conrad Bakers marketers must reveal their support in the social causes that are in the line of helping the society they serve. This is done by sponsoring charity events in the society. By doing so, the company is in a position to gain loyal customers and solid reputation.
- Relationships
Many businesses fail to penetrate into the market because they do not have knowledge in their area of marketing and do not have skill to meet the customer need and wants. Therefore, in order to enhance customer relationships, the marketers should display problem analysis and decision making skills that are able to produce products that meet the consumer need and wants.
- Global perspective
The Conrad Bakers company must enhance marketing strategies that makes the business recognizable in the global scale. Many companies fail to recognize and identify taste and preferences of different cultures across the world. Thus, the company must comply with social responsibilities by catering to the diverse melting pot globally. The products should be cultural friendly with suitable ad and advertising words.
- Relationship between Ethical, Legal, and Social issues
The relationship between these three issues is clear. The three issues focus on building the business reputation through provision of the products and services that meets customer needs and wants. The problem with ethical, legal and social issues occurs when the business engages actions that are unhealthy to their consumers (Prestoungrange, 1974). Therefore, any company has to comply with ethical, legal and social regulations in order to be recognized reputable in its operations.
References
Fine, S. H. (1981). The marketing of ideas and social issues. New York, N.Y: Praeger.
Flynn, N. (2006). Blog rules: A business guide to managing policy, public relations, and legal issues. New York: AMACOM, American Management Association.
Kotler, P. (1986). Principles of marketing. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.
Moon, C. (2001). Business ethics. London: Economist.
Prestoungrange, G. (1974). Strategic issues in marketing. New York: Wiley.
