Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

BEYOND THE FOUR Ps

Marketing ethics goes beyond the four Ps—product development, pricing, placing, promotion—discussed above. A few more aspects are discussed hereunder:

• Keeping information about the stakeholders confidential.
  • Consider the case of a bank selling its customer list containing phone numbers and addresses to a communications firm that makes a contact by phone or mail to market its product.
  • Some large firms often pass their client list to other divisions for cross-selling or up-selling. For instance, a bank’s insurance division may dip into the credit card’s customer list for prospecting. One or two such stray calls may not be uncomfortable to a customer; but consider a bank with ten different divisions and each dipping into the ...