As a bottler of natural spring water, your advertising department has recently launched a campaign that emphasizes the purity of your product. The industry is highly competitive, and your organization has been badly hurt by a lengthy strike of unionized employees. The strike seriously disrupted production and distribution, and it caused your company to lose significant revenues and market share. Now that the strike is over, your company will have to struggle to recoup lost customers, and pay for the increased wages and benefits called for in the new union contract. The company's financial situation is precarious to say the least. You and the entire senior management team have high hopes for the new ad campaign, and initial consumer response has been positive. You are shocked then, when your head of operations reports to you that an angry worker has sabotaged one of your bottling plants. The worker introduced a chemical into one of the machines, which in turn contaminated 120,000 bottles of the spring water. Fortunately, the chemical is present in extremely minute amounts - no consumer could possibly suffer harm unless they drank in excess of 10 gallons of the water per day over a long period of time. Since the machine has already been sterilized, any risk of long-term exposure has been virtually eliminated. But, of course, the claims made by your new ad campaign could not be more false.

Q 2.1 What are the ethical issues in this case?

Q 2.2. As CEO would you proceed with the advertising campaign or not ? Explain your reasons.

Section Three