1. Ideation or concept generation often leads us to explore the minds of customers to find something they want or will want when they hear about it. Your firm uses intrusive techniques, such as unannounced observation and psychological projective techniques. A customer recently said it is unethical to trick people into telling you what they want.
2. Your market research director uses focus groups for concept testing and lets company people secretly sit behind the mirrors as your customers react to the new concepts. They often joke about customers’ product usage practices.
3. You introduce a temporary product that will be replaced when a better one in development is ready a year from now. You are told not to let distributors or your sales force know it is only temporary.
4. You work for a management training firm and are about to market a new seminar service for banks. Your firm, for a fee, will run seminars during which you will train bank personnel in investment counseling. But there is no product use test on the seminar, and you don’t know that the bank people will really learn how to counsel.
5. You work for a detergents company and recently learned that over the years thousands of rodents have been force-fed each new product, including versions in development. The force-feeding goes on until half of the rodents die (the so-called LD50 test).
6. You are currently working on a patented item that schools will use for map displays. It is so good that virtually every K–12 school will buy several of them. You come across the cost figures and calculate that the gross margin will run about 80 percent. A co-worker comments that the price could be cut in half and the company margin would still be a healthy 60 percent.
7. You work for a database service that recently began collecting patient records from physicians and now offers a new service of information for pharmaceutical firms. The records sometimes contain names and often include age, sex, and so on of the patients. Information includes nature of illnesses and treatments.
8. The Food and Drug Administration has charged that your new Freshland spaghetti sauce is processed and sold nonrefrigerated; it therefore cannot be called “fresh” in its brand name. Your firm counters that it is fresher than the leading competitor, and besides, lots of products are advertised as being fresh when they technically aren’t, by the arbitrary FDA definition.
9. A set of “educational” game cards, made by your firm and not really very educational, are known to be bought by less intelligent parents for their children. There are several far better sets of such cards on the market.
10. Your strategy is to stir up the waters—marketing a long line of similar products to confuse customers and keep them from being able to “buy intelligently.”
11. You have a line of party products that seem to be in sync with many younger people, but are sexually oriented. You market them through mass outlets, not adult stores, and although some retailers won’t stock the items, many will. Sales have been outstanding.
12. You work as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. Food and Drug Administration rules prohibit “off-label promotion,” that is, marketing a drug for uses other than those approved by the FDA. Your company funds thousands of medical-education programs yearly at which doctors and other health professionals make presentations about the use of certain drugs, some of which are not yet approved by the FDA (but are written up in the medical journals as effective). They say they are doing nothing wrong, but you see this as a clear violation of off-label promotion rules. For you, the last straw is when you attend a sales meeting at which you are instructed to recruit medical speakers to talk about approved and unapproved uses of a new blood clot drug.
Pick two or three of these scenarios, and conceptualize how you might resolve the issue. Alternatively, comment on if you don't think the situation presents an ethical issue at all.