Marketing is a basic management process with the main purpose of selling goods and services to customers. The quintessential aspect of this process is understanding customers’ needs and wants. With that in mind, advertisers take a great variety of approaches (quite often unethical) trying to get people to buy the advertised services and goods. Freedom of speech and press gives the people in marketing department a right of advertising their products in almost every which way they prefer, sometimes even in somewhat abusive, or to certain extent offensive manner. An example of this would be the advertisement by a fishing company where a hidden image of “Fishy Catering” is added to a religious icon.
For some people such a “fishy” move may be nothing, but a funny image. On the other hand, for people with Christian religious affiliation that ad might be the source of perplexity, or even anger.These issues often take place when marketers try to catch the minds of majority in a specific cultural region, while forgetting about the minorities. In this very case, however it is doubtful that the add was designed for a predominantly non-Christian society, considering the English name of the company. The possible purpose of using religious image in the advertisement of the product is to create a strong impression that would later on make the audience differentiate the product from the other goods in the market.