Review the list of possible personal ethics scenarios presented below. Pick 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.
Personal Ethics Scenarios:
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. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.