Legal and Ethical Considerations in Marketing, Product Safety, and Intellectual Property

Among many ethical issues that relates to marketing and advertising, deception objection is one of the core issue. It is of great importance that advertising and marketing agents adhere to the general guidelines that govern this subject area. One of the major themes under deception objection is upholding the truth or the avoidance of distorting the truth (Amoako, 2012). Needless to say, marketing agents must always speak the truth, and avoid misleading information about what is being advertised. In addition, ethical and legal issues of intellectual property include copyright issues. It seeks to prevent any artistic work from being plagiarized and thus reduce the cases of piracy. The last legal and ethical issue is product safety. Infantile fires, for example, are a major risk to juveniles and therefore there is a need to provide all the necessary information about the artifact being marketed (Frazier, 2000).

Direct –to- Consumer Marketing by Drug companies

This is the advertising that is aimed at promoting some drugs that treat cases of wakefulness and sexual dysfunctions that relates to erection (Shaw et al, 2006). While arguing against it, such adverts will cause a fall out between medical doctors and their patients in that the latter may make demands of drugs they may not need from the former. Moreover, lack of restrictions from authorities may lead to abuse of these drugs and thus cause detrimental effects like impotence to the user. On the contrary, such advertisements create awareness to the consumers about these drugs and thus temporarily putting the role that doctors play behind the scenes. This trend may be bipolar in nature. It may save time due to the fact that the consumer is not compelled to see the doctor for prescription but on the other hand, may cause problems of overdose and wrong prescription.

References

Amoako, P. (2012). Ethics in Advertising. Advertising and Marketing Journal , 1, 63-72.

Frazier, P. et al. (2000). Juvenile Fire-setter Intervention Project. Virginia: TriData Corporation.

Shaw, A. (2008, March 4). Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTC) of Pharmaceuticals. Retrieved September 12, 2013, from ProQuest Discovery Guides: http://www.csa.com