Any marketing-related strategies should not be permitted when violating professional ethics and regulations. However, some companies always use leaks of laws and ethics to deceive customers to enlarge their popularities and maximize their profits.The criticism of unethical marketing issues mostly refers to products themselves, price setting and distribution channels and methods. Today, I mainly focused on how companies affect customers and social environment detrimentally through excessive packaging, underweight and unclear labels. Firstly, numerous companies put too much expense and thoughts on packaging their products to make them attractive , like using five layers silk to wrap a box of moon cakes. In fact, the costs of products themselves are not worth that much as selling prices. Thus, the prices customers actually paid are mostly the cost of the packages. Thus, defeating competitors by using excessive packages unethically sacrifices the benefits of consumers. Another common ethical issue is that the weight shown on the package does not match its real weight. Most companies consider that most customers will not actually measure the weight; thus, by decreasing products’ weight secretly and irresponsibly companies can reduce the cost of raw materials and transportation fees. This action totally violates the professonal ethics, harms consumers’ benefits and involves in real cheating. Finally, those unclear labels also can cause consumers’ health problem, especially the unclear expire dates and component contents. For example, consumers may get food poisoning by eating expired food. Also, unclear sugar content may cause the diabetes patients to rise blood sugar to a dangerous level. Thus, being moral and ethical is really necessary for marketing and running business. In order to protect both consumers and their benefits, companies may use “the Prima Facie Daty Framwork” as a ethical guild-line to regulate themselves.
