Shelly Shaw-Faulkner Doctor Peter A. Doherty BUS 221: International Marketing August 27, 2009 Case 4-7 (2). Can you recommend alternative strategies or solutions to the dilemmas confronting the tobacco companies? To governments? What is the price of ethical behaviors? Most marketing decisions have ethical ramifications whether business executives recognize it or not. When proper action is taken, the ethical dimensions go unnoticed, but when the marketing decision is ethically troublesome, the outcome can be publicly embarrassing or worse.
Alternative means of controlling should include the health-related consequences of smoking including further promotion of restrictions and tighter controls on the sale and distribution of tobacco. Social marketing programmers based on techniques developed by the tobacco industry should be used. We should use of the industry’s own tactics to counter its messages. Tobacco companies should recognize that they have a responsibility to people who live outside their own borders, and view themselves as part of the global community.
Looking at China for example we are faced with ethical dilemmas which require consideration. First, there is the ethical dilemma of business versus health. The opening and development of the tobacco business in China, which includes vigorous marketing, is considered against the health consequences of tobacco use which is estimated to cost 600 000 lives annually in China, rising to 2 million by 2025 without effective tobacco control programs.
A second ethical dilemma is employment versus impoverishment, in which the opportunities for work in the tobacco industry are considered against a background of malnutrition caused in part by a proportion of household budgets used to buy tobacco, and the erosion of the land, as trees are used to produce tobacco. Gains have already been made in tobacco control in China, which leaves the way open for much development in the future. 4.
Should a company be forced to stop marketing a product that is not illegal, such as cigarettes? As the health consequences of tobacco smoking have become more apparent, governments should regulate the types of promotion available to cigarette manufacturers. Yet despite these efforts, the tobacco industry has continued to develop highly visible promotions that make greater use of youth role models and of new media known to have high penetration among youth.
Attempts to reduce the impact of the tobacco industry’s promotions seem unintentionally to have stimulated the development of more subtle initiatives that are harder to regulate and that reach and influence young people even more effectively. They should not be forced to stop marketing the product but greater transparency should be required from the tobacco companies to make it clear the harm that can come from their product.
