Watch the Skillsoft video, E-Marketing Ethics and the Marketing MixLinks to an external site., and write a brief paragraph for each of the e-commerce ethical issues below, explaining how you will address each one.

1. Avoiding deceptive, unfair, or offensive online marketing

2. Preventing price discrimination based upon Internet accessibility

3. Ensuring the privacy and security of customer data

4.Reducing the climate impact of the product's distribution

Video transcript:

E-Marketing Ethics and the Marketing Mix

[Topic: E-Marketing Ethics and the Marketing Mix.] HOST: Corporate responsibility and laws for enforcing it mean that companies are obliged to conduct their marketing activities in an ethical manner. However, some common e-marketing practices continue to raise ethical concerns. They include practices that are considered deceptive, offensive, and objectionable.

Deceptive marketing often involves leading customers to believe they'll get more value than they'll actually receive. This is also known as unfair marketing. It involves misrepresentations, omissions, and use of misleading information.

Offensive marketing practices are often associated with communication strategies and campaigns that involve issues like sexuality, gender, stereotypes, racism, homophobia, or xenophobia. Marketing efforts may cause offense because they handle potentially inflammatory content in insensitive ways.

Objectionable marketing practices include persistent and high-pressure selling, telemarketing calls, and TV commercials that are too long or run too frequently. Other objectionable practices include using marketing to take advantage of young people or senior citizens, disguising sales appeals as contests, using junk mail and spam, and improper use of mailing lists.

Marketing has adapted to capitalize on the opportunities that e-commerce provides. However, the use of e-marketing raises ethical concerns associated with each element of the traditional marketing mix product, price, promotion, and place.

The first concern, related to the product area of the marketing mix, is the safety and quality of products. With e-marketing, there's concern about a lack of regulation regarding what can be sold and who can buy it.

Next there's price. Ethical concerns surrounding the price variable in e-marketing mainly arise from discrimination on the basis of Internet accessibility. This means a degree of discrimination sometimes occurs when a customer benefits from having Internet access. For example, if a bottle of shampoo is sold online at a cheaper price than in store, someone who buys the shampoo online may benefit unfairly.

The third variable is promotion. A key ethical concern here is privacy. The Internet enables e-marketers to collect and store customers' personal information and behavioral habits much more easily and in larger volumes than traditional marketing. Collecting data in this manner is called data mining.

Last, when it comes to the place element of the marketing mix, the key online ethical issue is distribution. Online distribution is subject to the same kinds of concerns as traditional distribution. In addition, an ethical concern is that when companies establish their own web sites, this may have a negative impact on traditional business partners.

The use of e-marketing raises ethical issues surrounding product quality and safety, price discrimination, privacy, and potentially unethical distribution.