VI. Writing

Write an essay on one of the following topics.

1. Protectionism policies in stimulating the demand for domestic products and their impact on the market situation.

2. The society of consumption: true and false values.

3. Which is the lesser evil – lack of supply or lack of demand?

Unit 5. Marketing and Marketing Techniques. Business Ethics and Social Responsibility.

I. Anticipating the Issue

1. Discuss your answers to the following questions.

1. Is a good quality or an acceptable price enough to guarantee good sales of a product? If not, what else should be done to stimulate customers’ demand?

2. What marketing techniques do you know? Are they influential? Why? / Why not?

3. What do you think should dominate in running a business – profit at all costs or ethics? Are the two factors interdependent? How?

II. Background Reading

Read the following text. Focus on the meaning of the boldfaced words. Determine whether what you anticipated coincides with the information of the text.

Marketing. Marketing Techniques and Ethics

1. Someone produces the things you want because you are buying those things and paying a profitable price. You produce what others want because that's the way you get the money to buy what you want. So, just like that, the society chooses “what to produce”. The market answers the question automatically. But in order not to fail in the attempt “to guess” the needs of the others, something should be done. What's the use of producing things or services which are not going to be bought? Special efforts being made to study the market situation are known as marketing.

2. Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society. Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research. The objective of marketing is not only market studying but also influencing the market situation.

3. In the early 1960s, Professor Neil Borden identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a “Marketing Mix”. Professor E. Jerome McCarthy, in the early 1960s suggested the Marketing Mix containing 4 elements and known as “4 P's”: product, price, place and promotion.

• The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how they relate to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.

• Pricing refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts.

• Placement (or distribution) refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point-of-sale placement or retailing. This third P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or service is sold.

• Promotion includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding.

4. There are distinct stages in converting strangers to customers that govern the communication medium that should be used.

• Advertising is a paid form of public presentation and expressive promotion of ideas aimed at masses. The main objectives of advertising are to maintain demand for well-known goods, to introduce new and unknown goods and to increase demand for well-known goods, products or services.

• Branding means creating reference of certain products in mind. A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes products and services from competitive offerings. A brand represents the consumers' experience with an organization, product, or service.

• Personal sales are oral presentations given by a salesman who approaches individuals or a group of potential customers. They pre-suppose live, interactive relationship, personal interest, attention and response.

• Sales promotions are short-term incentives to encourage buying of products: an example is coupons or a sale. People are given an incentive to buy, but this does guarantee that the customer is going to buy the customer's product in the future.

• Marketing Public Relations (MPR) stimulate demand through press release giving a favourable report to a product and secure a higher degree of credibility and, as a result, boost enterprise's image.

5. The point of special attraction even not only in the world of business but also among consumers has recently become ethics of sales and marketing. Marketing may seek to manipulate our values and behavior. To some extent society regards this as acceptable, but where is the ethical line to be drawn? It is considered unethical when a company makes use of price discrimination, anti-competitive practices, pyramid scheme, spam (electronic), marketing in schools, black or grey markets, false advertising. Ethics of production deals with the duties of a company to ensure that products and production processes do not cause harm. Its main issues are pollution, environmental ethics, genetically modified food, mobile phone radiation and health. Ethics of intellectual property states that knowledge and skills are valuable but not easily "ownable" as objects and focuses on the issues of patent, copyright and trademark infringement, biopiracy and industrial espionage. Ethics of accounting information regards misleading financial analysis, bribery, facilitation payments, accounting scandals and other criminal manipulation of the financial markets. Ethics of human resource management (HRM) covers ethical issues arising around the employer-employee relationship, such as the rights and duties owed between employer and employee: discrimination issues such as those on the basis of age (ageism), gender, race, religion, disabilities, occupational safety and health.