EVERY social grouping and community espouses what are ordinarily considered to be acceptable behaviour, values or norms.
Even the Zambian people according to their different social groupings such as tribe, religion or profession have their own ideals and values.
A few years ago, a friend narrated to me a story about his uncle who had gone to the UK for studies.
During his stay there, he came to learn that it was not the custom of the English to greet each other every morning, especially when it was freezing.
His early days at campus, he would greet his neighbours every morning but to his astonishment they would not reciprocate, not until one man asked him what was special about the morning?
Any discussion on ethics will essentially also have to look at morality.
Ethics usually relate to a prescribed code of conduct, whereas morals refer to generally acceptable ways of behaviour.
Marketers as a group of people who share a common background in terms of specialisation and training equally subscribe to ethics.
Like any other professionals, marketers are there to provide and offer services to others and in doing so it is necessary that a certain level of professional responsibility is exercised.
All individuals whom society has placed some responsibility will be expected to carry out their duties in the most transparent, decent and honest manner.
Imagine how our World would be if marketers decided to operate as they wish, no rules and no guidelines.
For those of you who had the misfortune of having transacted with Katondo dealers, you understand exactly what I am driving at, here the rule of win, win does not apply.
For marketers, this demand and expectation is even much greater since the profession involves dealing with all kinds of people who constitute the consumers and customers.
For example, the consumers should believe and trust that the products or commodities being marketed to them are relatively safe and will function according to their expectations.
It is well-known that as human beings, we are all driven by personal ambitions, objectives, needs, demands and pressure.
Marketers are not an exception from these challenges. It is because of this reason that professional bodies and institutions have been established to enhance professional practice and regulate the conduct of registered practitioners.
In the marketing practice, we have professional institutions such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) the biggest marketing professional body in the World and the United Kingdom.
The United States of America has the American Marketing Association (AMA), while in Zambia we have the Zambia Institute of Marketing (ZIM). These institution’s responsibilities among others are to promote professional conduct among members through prescribed codes of conduct or professional ethics.
However, having these institutions in place, does not imply that they are not going to be any malpractices in marketing. There are many factors that can be attributed to this problem.
For instance in Zambia, we have non-marketing qualified people in industry who have been employed to do marketing jobs.
We also have marketing practitioners who prefer not to register themselves with professional bodies, to whom they should be answerable should they be found wanting.
And the worst of all are those who masquerade as qualified marketers when they are not qualified.
All these factors compound the situation.
The Zambia Institute of Marketing Act Number 14 of 2003 mandates the institute among other things to promote, uphold and improve the standards of marketing training, practice and professional competence of persons engaged in marketing in Zambia.
Under this Act, it is illegal for anyone who is not qualified and registered with the marketing body to practise marketing in any organisation.
However, despite having this legal framework, consumers still get to experience unethical practices from some organisations in many ways.
Some of the most common unethical practices by marketers include poor customer service, examples are promising a consumer that you will deliver and yet fail to deliver, selling substandard products, misleading information about products, in other words embellishment of products, false content descriptions on product packaging labels, such as the inscription of words‘Pure Fruit Juice’ when in fact the product is not processed from pure fruit extracts.
Other forms of unethical practices are associated with quality assurance or guarantee statements such as 100 per cent quality guarantee.
Remember that this claim can only be made by internationally acclaimed brands which have a worldwide reputation of achieving high quality standards and have to that effect been certified to make this statement, or have been certified by the Zambia Bureau of Standards to make this pledge.
Further ethical issues are overbilling customers, price fixing, deceptive sales promotions methods the list is endless.
Incidentally, almost all organisations are prone to marketing misconduct and discovering and dealing with these problems is the only effective way to be successful in today’s complex regulatory system.
(The author is a consultant in marketing, public relations and customer service)
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