Phone technology nowadays has incorporated high quality camera features onto the phone. For the past recent years, phone camera features and quality has gradually become a consumer’s preference when picking a phone. These features include high-resolution pictures, great zooming capability, face recognition, panoramic view, red eye removal, and many more. Hence, companies like Nokia started promoting phone camera features and quality to market their new phones. However, in Nokia’s recent advertisement promoting their new product Lumia 920, there were ethical issues regarding the materials they showed. In this commercial, a man is using the Lumia 920 to videotape the girl cycling beside him. The screen then switches to the perspective of the phone, giving the impression of a true representation of the camera quality; their newest feature of “Optical Image Stabilization”. Except, in reality the commercial never videotaped with the phone. As revealed by many YouTube users, a white van with a cameraman using a stage camera shooting the commercial was seen off a reflection in a segment of the commercial. Thus, the material shown to public is quite misleading, resulting with people believing that it was filmed with the Lumia 920.

Revenues, opportunity costs, and the unwillingness to change dates for the commercial are all possibly factors that leaded this incident. Nokia’s Lumia 920 was not ready by the time they started filming the commercial. Two likely options were: continue with creating the commercial but using the stage camera instead, or postpone the date and create the commercial when the product’s ready.  Since they chose to shoot it anyways without the product, they prioritized revenue and cost over making an ethical decision to provide a true representation of the product’s “Optical Image Stabilization” ability. This decision had cost their customer’s trust; their stock price dropped a good 45%. Trust is very hard to gain and losing that weighs more than losing the amount of money Nokia would have lost if they postponed the date.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-10/nokia-to-conduct-ethics-review-about-misleading-ads