Legal and Ethical Issues Digital Marketing
Full details of coursework or other non-exam assessment
One 3,000 word (excluding references) individual essay (100%).
You are required to answer the following question:
Assume that you are advising a company of your own choice on their potential new international
expansion opportunities using foreign direct investment. Your task is to write an essay covering the
following information:
- Briefly provide a profile of the company chosen (no more than one page).
- Identify the most attractive potential new foreign market for the company, with appropriate reasons to
support your choice. - Recommend the most appropriate method for entering the market and explain your reasoning.
- Highlight the significant liabilities of foreignness presented to the company in that market and advise
how it can address these challenges.
Every digital marketing company must adhere to the legal and ethical issues
confronting the digital markets. To my understanding, marketers can target and reach customers
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or consumers with a more prominent content generated for users than ever before. This is
achievable by using the social media sites, which is an excellent opportunity to reach more
consumers and increase sales revenue. However, despite the digital marketing being favorable to
marketers, there are critical legal and ethical issues or standards that they must follow too. The
concept of marketing has existed for long, but the recent advance in the use of digital marketing
has become an area of contention with issues of legal and ethics in marketing appearing dubious
and ill defined. For instance, when data collection has privacy invasion, do promotional activities
become a misleading claim? Queries rising in digital marketing include the blurred line privacy
invasion and data collection and the grey part between attracting customers and deceptive
marketing or advertisement.
I think this is easy claim to know because it’s hard to understand where the ethical
issues in marketing lie. Digital marketers should be careful treading on the right side of the line
between illegal and legal. Besides, data collection should be the most significant and first stage
of marketing. Wide data helps marketers to select the most optimal marketing procedures for
company’s customer base. For example, companies like Facebook and Google mainly rely on
attracting and retaining users of the web history to generate more returns (Grindrod 2016).
However, there is yet no legal position as individuals push for more privacy laws. A recent
survey of 11,000 of people had 70% claiming to be happy to use ‘do not track’ features on the
available search engines. I believe business needs to be more conscious of consumer privacy
when collecting data.
Furthermore, I believe that companies should use delivery channels for data
distribution effectively avoids data altercations. Countries have different time frames for
telemarketing and door-to-door marketing strategies. I propose that consumers must be aware of
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these legal and ethical issues surrounding the majority of consumers. I believe that marketers
more than often get away with unethical and illegal behavior. I propose that consent must be
explicitly stated in data distribution procedures with an existing trade relationship. Marketers use
claims, which are misleading about the product quality, its availability and other exclusion on the
company brand. I recommend that marketing techniques such as pictures must have a message,
which never contradicts the overall advertisement as any other message will be misleading and
illegal (Grindrod 2016).
Besides, marketers must be aware of spamming as they promote unsolicited
messages, which are unethical behavior. It is common in emails and marketers have harassed
consumers by a violation of their privacy. Consumers get continuous and unwanted messages.
Marketers must respect social media personal information of users’ privacy and credibility. I
believe that disclosing of this information to other channels or companies is an invasion of
privacy.
Marketers pretend to be a satisfied consumer by creating blogs or social media
sites to post a review pretending to be a satisfied consumer of their company product. Besides,
misleading marketers discuss how fantastic their product is and how consumers are purchasing it
which is illegal. For instance, Wal-Mart and L’Oreal have been victims of this conspiracy, which
damages company’s reputation.
There are legal and ethical issues faced by marketers on marketing through social
media. It is crazy to think how marketers invade spam and privacy and for me; the Internet seems
a lawless battlefield for marketers. I think that if marketers do not stop crossing the lines,
consumers will soon revolt. I think consumers will turn anonymous browsers and may reduce
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their use of Internet because of the much unethical and illegal activities going on. I think
consumers are starting to realize the extent of what digital marketers can do genuinely.
References
Grindrod, P., 2016. Beyond privacy and exposure: ethical issues within citizen-facing
analytics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 374(2083), p.20160132.
