Carter, Stacy, and Eagle, Lynne (2016) Social marketing ethics. AASM Viewpoint, 5 (3). pp. 1-3.

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Abstract

[Extract] Back in December 2013, Lynne Eagle and colleagues wrote a Viewpoint about the ethics of social marketing, which included a link to a preliminary survey about the ethical dilemmas that social marketers face. It's fair to say that the response rate to that survey wasn't great (13 responses from a membership of 150). But in July 2014, at the International Social Marketing Conference in Victoria, we handed out paper-based surveys, and had 50 responses (a big thank you to everyone who participated).

The low initial response rate to the online survey might suggest that members of AASM aren't much interested in ethics. But the content of the responses both to the online and the paper-based survey suggest otherwise—at least for some social marketers (Eagle et al., 2015). We presented a Likert scale, asking people to rate their support for the idea of making various ethical resources available (from 1=do not support at all to 5=strongly support). Across the 63 respondents, average support for ethics training was 3.95 (SD=.965), for the development of a specific social marketing ethics code was 4.02 (SD=1.055), for a support person to contact was 4.10 (SD=.987) and for availability of ethics case studies was 4.11 (SD=.935). This suggests that social marketers do experience ethical challenges in their work, and would like help with them. In the online survey, people had an opportunity to nominate up to three key ethical dilemmas that they thought social marketers faced. A core set of problems was repeated across responses, suggesting that they may arise for many members. They included concern about being manipulative, deceptive, offering incentives or otherwise undermining people's autonomy, and concerns about fairness and targeting, including targeting people who can change easily rather than the most needy, and using the results of formative research 'against' audiences.

Item ID:	44922
Item Type:	Article (Short Note)
Keywords:	social marketing, ethics
Related URLs:	Publisher
Additional Information:	From the publisher's website: "AASM Viewpoint is a bi-monthly opinion piece written by invitation by Social Marketing experts regarding a topical issues relating to the social markerting field."
Date Deposited:	04 Aug 2016 04:03
FoR Codes:	15 COMMERCE, MANAGEMENT, TOURISM AND SERVICES > 1505 Marketing > 150502 Marketing Communications @ 100%
SEO Codes:	91 ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK > 9104 Management and Productivity > 910403 Marketing @ 100%
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