Marketing grasps the interest of consumers and can be observed everywhere as companies integrate all kinds of marketing strategies in people’s daily lives. As technology develops and the world progresses forward, marketing mediums have also expanded to a wide variety of forms and are substantially more effective nowadays. However, due to the recent popularity in Internet marketing, consumers have raised concerns about their privacy when companies use online technologies to track information and analyze consumer behaviour.
There are several ways that companies can use this online database to make profit. Marketers can detect consumers’ use of other companies’ applications in order to improve their own and attack their competitors. They can also send advertisements that may be of interests to particular consumers from the consumer profile that they have created through surveys. None of these actions can be categorized as of high moral standards in the society that we live in today since consumers were unaware of the information tracking process.
A recent article “Where Consumers Draw The Line With Personal Data Collection”, published by MarketingCharts staff, indicates that the majority of customers around the world feel that companies collect too much information from website customization and that their information is shared with 3rd parties. At the same time, everyone knows the importance and necessity of marketing, thus most people are willing to share and to provide information that would hopefully result in a win-win situation between both consumers and marketers. Nevertheless, marketers must clearly set the ethical boundary between collecting information to improve their products and invading individual privacy. The lack of communication with consumers who heavily value privacy will result in customer dissatisfaction and moral criticism from the society.
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