The Greek philosopher Epicurus's theory about "Ethic of Reciprocity" which basically explains "Do not treat others in ways you would not like to be treated" was used as a base for John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham to develop the Utilitarianism's theory which explains that the most ethical behavior is "the behavior that produces the greatest good", in other words is saying that, the good for everybody is always the good for one self too.
For example, if I take my dog out for a walk, and the dog decides to poo in the middle of the sidewalk while nobody is watching but I still pick it up anyway, not only because is the correct thing to do, but also out of respect for everybody else walking that sidewalk later, this ethical behavior will actually benefit me directly since I am helping to the common good of having a city with clean sidewalks and because I expect everybody else to also pick up their dog's poop so I don't step in one later.
Now, the philosopher Immanuel Kant even went further with the idea that overall good is also the individual good, and created the famous "categorical imperative" theory that applies to marketing ethics, and describes the social and catastrophic impact of the unethical use of marketing campaigns in societies and economies.
Is well known that marketers often need to make ethical decisions about their work in daily bases, and can easily come across the question "is something still bad if everyone is doing it?", so this theory explains why is beneficial for the marketers itselves to act ethically.
The theory explains that, is not ok to do something ethically wrong even if everyone is doing it because that would create "Tragedy of the Commons effect", meaning that (taking the dog's poop example), if everyone is letting their dogs' poop on the sidewalk, is still not correct to leave my dog's poop in the sidewalk because I will be part of the problem and contributing to the chaos and not the solution. In other words, the streets will be mined with dogs' poop all over and I will also be stepping into others dogs' poop every time I would go out.
Now, you might ask, what has this to do with marketing, right?
Well for example, if most the marketing companies in America would start creating unethical promotional campaigns that would falsely advertise products or services with untruthful expectations or results, it might bust sales for a short term, but ultimately it would hurt all marketers (even the ones that acted ethically) because "the advertising would lose its credibility, its integrity, and end up destroying the usefulness of this major diffusion of innovation tool". In other words advertising campaigns would lose effectiveness and the efficiency of the markets, since the consumers would lose belief in the advertising campaigns for all products or services and would think twice before spending their money.
Ultimately, the unethical use of marketing campaigns would hurt not only the companies that sell the products or services, but also the advertising companies in general and even the economy of the whole country!
In fact, this subject really touched me because I am from Argentina and consumers have a big disbelief, specially in companies that offer services, such as telecommunication companies, insurance, banks, investment, electricity among so many others, and people have a really bad presumption in the whole market because they know these companies would always try to rip them off, and consequently they buy less, spend less and take twice time to decide weather they want to spend money to buy something or not, because they don't know if the product or service will fulfill their expectations since they don't trust advertising campaigns in general, which contributes to lower the consumer confidence level to spend money in the market, hitting directly the economy of the country.
So, we could just say that if marketers or advertisers act unethically, "Karma" would get back at them by the universal law of "Reciprocity" and hurt them back in the long run.
So, be fair ...or you know what they say... "Karmatic Marketing is a B***"
Paula C.
REFERENCED WEBSITES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Prefiguring_science_and_ethics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_Reciprocity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
http://www.howimademyfirstdollar.com/blogger/karmic-marketing-the-laws-of-reciprocity/
http://www.marketingprinciplesandprocesses.com/
