Deck 9: Marketing Ethics: Advertising and Digital Marketing

Question 1

Identify the statement that provides a reason why manipulation of consumers is not relevant to marketing ethics.

A)Knowing consumers' psychological profiles through marketing research, their motivations, interests, desires, beliefs, anxieties, and fears facilitates manipulation of their behavior.
B)Some marketing practices target populations that are particularly susceptible to manipulation and deception.
C)One need not necessarily deceive a person in order to manipulate him or her.
D)Manipulation doesn't necessarily entail total control over a person; it may simply be a process of subtle direction or management.
E)All of the answers are correct.
F)None of the answers are correct.

Answer 1

None of the answers are correct.

Question 2

Select the practice that is not a form of consumer manipulation.

A)Cigarette advertising aimed at children
B)Ads aimed at elderly population for such goods as Medicare supplementary insurance, casinos and gambling, nursing homes, and funeral services
C)Researching the criteria that a typical buyer uses to select a particular make and model of automobile
D)Selling an extended automobile warranty or theft protection products to a customer who is anxious about the whole process of buying an automobile

Answer 2

Researching the criteria that a typical buyer uses to select a particular make and model of automobile

Question 3

What statement suggests that the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol ad stating that "last year hospitals dispensed 10 times as much Tylenol as the next four brands combined" was suspiciously deceptive?

A)It was a simple statement of a valid claim about the product.
B)It was an effort to call attention to the practice of selling the drug to hospitals at a deep discount.
C)Johnson & Johnson wanted consumers to think that the medical profession and hospitals believed it was the most effective acetaminophen treatment on the market.
D)Johnson & Johnson wanted to show its commitment to lowering medical costs to consumers.

Answer 3

Johnson & Johnson wanted consumers to think that the medical profession and hospitals believed it was the most effective acetaminophen treatment on the market.

Question 4

Identify the statement that would not support the idea that determining precise standards for what constitutes deception and how best to regulate it is problematical.

A)The primary ethical wrong is in the intent to deceive, to intend to use someone's buying behavior for one's own ends. To prevent this wrong from occurring, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would have to punish on the basis of what it thinks a marketing practice will do to consumers rather that what it actually does to them.
B)It is enough to prevent beforehand harms that deceptive practices might do rather than regulate them after the harms have been done.
C)Regulation might be too strong because it may well turn out that consumers are deceived by relatively trivial marketing practices.
D)Regulation might be too weak if it places the burden on consumers to prove the deception.

Question 5

Select the statement that correctly describes the dependence effect derived from John Kenneth Galbraith's ideas on consumer affluence.

A)Consumers depend on the free market to learn about the products they may need and want.
B)Supply follows and depends on demand; consumers are only getting what they want.
C)Consumer demand depends on what producers have to sell. Demand is a function of supply. Advertising creates wants.
D)Owners of productive capital depend on giving consumers what they want; otherwise they would lose their investment.

Question 6

If consumers are being manipulated by advertising, what are some key ethical implications?

A)Individual autonomy, the central element of Kantian respect for persons, would be violated by the creation of wants.
B)If consumers pursue trivial and contrived products, market exchanges only appear to increase overall satisfaction.
C)Consumer autonomy is violated by advertising's ability to create nonautonomous desires.
D)The economy of the affluent society is contrived and distorted.
E)All of the answers are correct.
F)None of the answers are correct.

Question 7

Identify the statement that does not challenge Robert Arrington's argument that because marketing doesn't prevent us from renouncing our pre-existing and independent choices, our desires for them must be considered autonomous.

A)Gerald Dworkin's point that if an individual does not or cannot rationally reflect on a first-order desire (one he or she just happens to have at any time), then the fact that he or she doesn't renounce it does not prove conclusively that it is an autonomous desire.
B)Dworkin's further claim that autonomy is a second-order capacity of persons to reflect critically on first order preferences and the capacity to accept or change them in the light of higher order preferences and values.
C)Roger Crisp's claim that we need to know why a first-order desire is accepted, and if not renounced, if it is indeed independent from, say, advertising.
D)Even if some consumer choices are not autonomous, nothing in Dworkin's or Crisp's analysis shows that advertising is responsible for violating autonomy, only that some consumers do not act in a fully self-conscious way.

Question 8

Select the statements reflecting the general sense of vulnerability that is relevant to target marketing.

A)A person is vulnerable as a consumer because he or she is unable in some way to participate as a fully informed and voluntary participant in the market exchange.
B)A person is vulnerable because he or she is the typical customer for a particular product.
C)A person is vulnerable because he or she is susceptible to some physical, psychological, or financial harm other than the financial harm from an unsatisfactory market exchange.
D)A person may be seen as vulnerable because he or she belongs to some ethnic group, or is poor, or is a resident of a particular neighborhood.
E)A and D.
F)A and C.

Question 9

Which of the following examples are ways in which persons are vulnerable as consumers because they are vulnerable in some more general sense?

A)Elderly persons vulnerable to injuries and illnesses might be compelled to make consumer choices based on fear or guilt.
B)A grieving family member might make choices for funeral services based on guilt or sorrow.
C)An inner-city resident who is poor, uneducated, and chronically unemployed is unlikely to weigh the consequences of using drugs or alcohol.
D)A person afflicted with a medical condition or disease might feel fear associated with the condition that can lead to uninformed consumer choices.
E)All of the answers are correct.
F)None of the answers are correct.

Question 10

Select the statements that challenge the idea that marketers cannot be held liable for decisions that any individual makes.

A)Marketing addresses populations, not, as sales do, individuals, so no direct causal connection can be demonstrated between a marketing campaign and an individual's choices to buy a product.
B)If marketing is ineffective in influencing consumer choice, the marketers selling their services to businesses are committing fraud.
C)Any individual may choose not to buy a marketed product.
D)If marketing is effective and does influence consumer choices, it cannot disavow responsibility for the consequences of those choices.
E)B and D.
F)A and C.

Question 11

In the context of consumer privacy, which of the following statements is true of consumers' personal information?

A)Tracking of personal information is done anonymously so that consumers seldom know that it is occurring.
B)Social media companies are legally prohibited from selling the personal information of their users to advertisers.
C)Today's digital marketers have limited access to general demographic data based on age, gender, and income.
D)Digital marketing techniques have eliminated the ethical concerns that were raised during the traditional advertising era.

Question 12

Which of the following statements is true of manipulation?

A)Manipulation relies on appealing to the rational decision-making ability of the other person.
B)When attempts to manipulate are unsuccessful, there is no ethical wrongdoing.
C)Manipulation involves directing behavior without explicit consent or conscious understanding.
D)Manipulation is weakened when the persons manipulated believe that they have acted of their own accord.

Question 13

Manipulation of a person, considered as a process of subtle direction or management, does not entail total control of that person.

Question 14

It is impossible to manipulate someone without deceiving them.

Question 15

Even if most manipulation is done to further the manipulator's own ends at the expense of the person being manipulated, utilitarians would not generally be inclined to think that such manipulation necessarily lessens overall happiness.

Question 16

Ethical wrong is done either by intending to deceive consumers in order to manipulate their buying behavior, treating them as a mere means to one's own ends (the Kantian approach) or by the harmful consequences for consumers, competitors and overall market efficiency (the utilitarian approach) but not by both.

Question 17

Any effort by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to evaluate expected deceptive marketing practices would be seriously flawed because it would mean punishing business on the basis of what the FTC thinks might happen rather than on what actually does happen.

Question 18

The dependence effect is based on John Kenneth Galbraith's claim that consumer demand depends on what producers have to sell. In effect, advertising, by creating wants, manipulates consumers and violates their autonomy.

Question 19

Robert Arrington argues that marketing influences us by appealing to pre-existing and independent desires, and since marketing does not prevent us from renouncing those desires, and as long as we don't renounce them, they must still be considered autonomous.

Question 20

Both Gerald Dworkin and Roger Crisp would argue that critical reflection on a desire is not necessary for that desire to be autonomous.

Question 21

Even if marketing practices are effective, even if marketing can and does influence consumer choice, there is no reason to believe that marketing has any ethical responsibility for the consequences of choices made by consumers who are vulnerable to products that may harm their health.

Question 22

Sales, unlike marketing that is directed to general populations, are directed to individuals, and, as a result, any salesperson who fails to stop a sales pitch when he or she suspects that a customer's decision-making is not autonomous, is acting unethically.

Question 23

Mass marketing seeks to promote one's product to the widest possible audience, with the assumption that sales will increase in proportion to the number of people exposed to the advertisement.

Question 24

Hundreds of millions of people are themselves supplying personal information to businesses through the use of personal social media accounts.

Question 25

Guilt, pity, a desire to please, anxiety, fear, low self-esteem, pride, and conformity are powerful motivators that marketers rely on to promote their products.

Question 26

There is universal agreement for determining precise standards for what constitutes deception and how best to regulate it.