In the given age, the marketing campaigns for the alcohol industry has expanded, including the younger crowd within it’s advertisements. To improve sales, many alcohol brands have started advertisement their products using campaigns that target the younger generation, more specifically the college community. However, a large majority of the target audience is of college students, and a high percentage of college students are underage. Thus, this raises an ethical issue regarding the marketing of alcohol. Understandably, the alcohol brands are attempting to improve their sales, but the encouragement of students to consume alcohol is an ethical problem.

For this issue, a large source of this problem ties back to the college environment, where socializing comprises of drinking activities. Therefore, the alcoholic brands are not fully responsible for this problem. However, encouraging college students to buy their brands does not help the issue, and thus do play a part in the students’ growing desires to consume alcohol. Although the alcohol brands do not cause the underage drinking, they are still part of it. By changing their target audience in the advertisements to an older crowd they wouldn’t lose their sales by a significant amount as students are still going to purchase alcohol. However, the companies would be able to adhere to the ethical limitations of marketing.

In order to regulate the marketing activities and strategies used by the alcohol brand, the government should intervene and set regulations or rules regarding the marketing of items that possess an age limit for purchasing. Thus, alcohols would be able to market their products without overriding ethical issues.

Sources:

“Alcohol Industry Deny Immoral Marketing Tactics.” Alcohol Industry Deny Immoral Marketing Tactics. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.