Ethical considerations are increasingly important in the practice of marketing research. For the first week, you will consider six ethical dilemmas confronting marketing research practitioners. For this assignment, review the scenarios, paying particular attention to the situation and identified issues.
1. Determine key criteria for evaluating ethical situations.
2. Evaluate the key ethical dilemma in each scenario.
3. Develop recommendations related to improving ethical research and reporting.
4. Include justification that supports the recommended process or approach.
Scenario 1 You are the market research director of a pharmaceutical company, and the executive director suggests to you that company interviewers telephone physicians under the name of a ?ctitious market research agency. The purpose of the survey is to help assess the perceived quality of the company’s products, and it is felt that the suggested procedure will result in more objective responses.
Scenario 2 You are employed by a marketing research ?rm and have conducted an attitude study for a client. Your ?ndings indicate that the product’s marketing efforts are not effective. This ?nding is badly received by the client’s product management team. They request that you omit that data from your formal report, which you know will be widely distributed, on the grounds that the oral presentation was adequate for their needs.
Scenario 3 You are a study director for a research company undertaking a project for a regular client of your company. A study you are working on is about to go into the ?eld when the questionnaire you sent to the client for ?nal approval comes back drastically modi?ed. The client has rewritten it, introducing leading questions and biased scales. An accompanying letter indicates that the questionnaire must be sent out as revised. You do not believe that valid information can be gathered using the revised instrument.
Scenario 4 A well-respected public figure is going to face trial on a charge of failing to report his part ownership of certain regulated companies while serving as a Canadian provincial minister. The defense lawyers have asked you, as a market research specialist, to do a research study to determine the characteristics of people most likely to sympathize with the defendant and hence to vote for acquittal. The defense lawyers have read newspaper accounts of how this approach has been used in a number of instances.
Scenario 5 You are the market research director for a large chemical company. Recent research indicates that many of your company’s customers are misusing one of its principal products. There is no danger resulting from this misuse, though customers are wasting money by using too much of the product at one time. You are shown the new advertising campaign by the advertising agency. The ads not only ignore this problem of misuse, they actually seem to encourage it.
Scenario 6 You show up your first day for a summer internship to meet your supervisor and get your first assignment. She gives you a questionnaire with specific marketing planning questions and tells you that she would like you to contact the company’s main three competitors and tell them you are a student doing a study on the industry and get the answers to the questions. She says you should not tell them you are working for the company over the summer and adds “there is nothing wrong with not telling them—omitting the fact is not really lying.” You ask her what you should do if they ask, and she says ‘just tell them you are a student working on a paper and you don’t want to get a poor grade on the assignment.”