The following scenarios present a set of ethical dilemmas that might arise in marketing research. Your assignment is to decide what action to take in each instance. You should be prepared to justify your decision. Bear in mind that there are no uniquely right answers: Reasonable people may choose different courses of action.

1. You are the market research director of a pharmaceutical company, and the executive director suggests to you that company interviewers telephone physicians under the name of a fictitious market research agency. The purpose of the survey is to help assess the perceived quality of the company’s products, and it is felt that the suggested procedure will result in more objective responses.

What action would you take?

2. You are employed by a marketing research firm and have conducted an attitude study for a client. Your findings indicate that the product’s marketing efforts are not effective. This finding is badly received by the client’s product management team. They request that you omit that data from your formal report, which you know will be widely distributed, on the grounds that the oral presentation was adequate for their needs.

What do you do?

3. You are a study director for a research company undertaking a project for a regular client of your company. A study you are working on is about to go into the field when the questionnaire you sent to the client for final approval comes back drastically modified. The client has rewritten it, introducing leading questions and biased scales. An accompanying letter indicates that the questionnaire must be sent out as revised. You do not believe that valid information can be gathered using the revised instrument.

What action would you take?
4. A well-respected public figure is going to face trial on a charge of failing to report his part ownership of certain regulated companies while serving as a Canadian provincial minister. The defense lawyers have asked you, as a market research specialist, to do a research study to determine the characteristics of people most likely to sympathize with the defendant and hence to vote for acquittal. The defense lawyers have read newspaper accounts of how this approach has been used in a number of instances.

What action would you take?

5. You are the market research director for a large chemical company. Recent research indicates that many of your company’s customers are misusing one of its principal products. There is no danger resulting from this misuse, though customers are wasting money by using too much of the product at one time. You are shown the new advertising campaign by the advertising agency. The ads not only ignore this problem of misuse, they actually seem to encourage it.

What action would you take?

6. You show up your first day for a summer internship to meet your supervisor and get your first assignment. She gives you a questionnaire with specific marketing planning questions and tells you that she would like you to contact the company’s main three competitors and tell them you are a student doing a study on the industry and get the answers to the questions. She says you should not tell them you are working for the company over the summer and adds “there is nothing wrong with not telling them omitting the fact is not really lying.” You ask her what you should do if they ask, and she says “just tell them you are a student working on a paper and you don’t want to get a poor grade on the assignment.”

What action would you take?