Image This Scenario: Your Company Is About to Market a New

Essay

Image this scenario: Your company is about to market a new line of espresso machines for home use. Your supervisor asks you to go online to various coffee house websites such as Starbucks, Seattle's Best, and Caribou Coffee and copy the best language from their descriptions of their products. "It won't be unethical," he tells you, "because they sell their espresso at their store. We're marketing in-home products. Just make a list of clever ideas, descriptions, metaphors, and phrases that we can use in our advertising copy."
Write a memo to your supervisor in which you explain which ethical dilemmas his instructions create, reasons to avoid such actions, and a proposal for how to solve this ethical problem.