Direct Marketing from an ethical point of view

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Communications - Ethics in the Media, grade: MA, Bournemouth University, 31 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Most people think that marketing is only about the advertising and/or personal selling of goods and services. Advertising and selling, however, are just two of the many marketing activities (Thomas and Housden, 2002). According to Boone and Kurtz (1997); 'Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, services, organizations, and events to create and maintain relationships that will satisfy individual and organizational objectives' (Boone and Kurtz, 1997: 202). Another definition of marketing, according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, is 'The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitability' (Tailor, 2000). In all the definitions of marketing the main point is to satisfy the customer needs. As known with in a global world it will be difficult for the companies to achieve this satisfaction because the needs and the demands are unlimited and the customers have many different alternatives for the different products. Powerful forces such as capitalism, global transport, communications, marketing and advertising, and transnational cosmopolitanism are interacting to dissolve the boundaries across national cultures and economies and in the eyes of some, accelerating the emergence of a homogeneous global consumer culture (Keegan and Green, 2003; Kotler, 2005). The conventional method of using countries as the cultural unit of analysis or as a basis for market segmentation, is increasingly ill-advised, given that most of the world's countries are already multicultural and growing ever more so, and even within relatively homogeneous nations, individuals vary substantially in the extent to which they identify with, adhere to, and practice cultural norms. Many researchers argue that increasing globalization is reducing the homogeneity of consumer behaviours within countries, while increasing communalities across countries (Cleveland and Laroche, 2007). The decreasing homogeneity forces the professionals to reach every type of the customer. Without reaching all types of the customer a company can never be successful because there will be another company reaching to that customer in the global world. In this point direct marketing becomes useful (Nash, 2000).