MKT-675 examines a range of ethical issues facing marketing managers as seen through the viewpoints of various comprehensive ethical theories. Traditional topics such as ethics in marketing research, product liability, selling, advertising, and pricing are covered, along with emerging ethical issues such as international marketing, competitive intelligence, socially controversial products, privacy, and corporate policies.
Applying ethical theory to real marketing dilemmas
The course grounds marketing ethics in established comprehensive ethical theories, giving students a rigorous analytical framework for evaluating marketing decisions rather than relying on personal intuition alone.
Traditional and emerging ethical challenges
MKT-675 spans both long-standing ethical concerns (product liability, advertising honesty, pricing fairness) and genuinely emerging issues (privacy, competitive intelligence, socially controversial products) that marketing managers increasingly face.
Key topics in MKT675
- Comprehensive ethical theories applied to marketing
- Ethics in marketing research and product liability
- Ethical issues in advertising and pricing
- International marketing ethics
- Privacy and competitive intelligence ethics
- Corporate policy and socially controversial products
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Worked example: applying ethical theory to a real dilemma
- Intuition-based judgment: Deciding a marketing tactic 'feels wrong' without a clear analytical basis
- Theory-grounded judgment: Evaluating the same tactic systematically against established ethical frameworks
- Lesson: MKT-675 teaches that grounding ethical judgment in comprehensive theory produces more consistent, defensible marketing decisions than relying on intuition alone
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Frequently asked questions
Different ethical theories can lead to genuinely different conclusions about the same marketing dilemma, and understanding these frameworks explicitly gives a marketing manager a rigorous, defensible basis for ethical decisions rather than an inconsistent, purely intuitive judgment that may not hold up to scrutiny or apply consistently across situations. MKT-675 uses comprehensive ethical theory because it equips students with genuine analytical tools for navigating ethical complexity, not just a vague sense that something feels wrong.
Some ethical challenges in marketing — product liability, advertising honesty, fair pricing — have been debated for decades and have well-established analytical frameworks, while newer challenges like digital privacy and competitive intelligence gathering raise genuinely novel ethical questions that established theory must be applied to in new ways. MKT-675 covers both because a graduate-level marketing manager needs to be equipped for well-understood ethical dilemmas as well as the newer ones that current marketing practice increasingly raises.