Mini case study

1. Exploiting women to promote beauty products is unethical. In order to understand this argument, it is imperative to reflect on the concept of ethics. “ Written regulations cannot cover all potential marketing abuses. Therefore, beyond written laws and regulations, business is also governed by social codes and rules of professional ethics,” (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010, p. 97). Basically, ethics refers to “ the rules or principles that define right and wrong conduct,” (Robbins, 1993, p. 14). The ethics of a firm often derive from its values referred to as “ essential and enduring tenets” that help define the company and are “ not to be compromised for financial gain or short term expediency,” (DesJardins, 2006, p. 5). It is evident from the definition given above that it is unethical to exploit women in promoting beauty products for financial gain. For instance, the aspect of stereotyping beauty has caused severe pressure on women who try hard to change their appearance in order to suit the ideal model of a beautiful woman.
Claiming that certain beauty products would make women look more beautiful unethical since it causes more negative impacts than positive gains especially on the consumers. This leads to social unrest where some women would end up looking down upon themselves and try to imitate the beauty stereotypes. Enlightened firms should encourage their managers to be socially responsible and seek ways to protect the long-run interests of their consumers (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010). In other words, presenting other beauty products as ideal for women causes unnecessary social unrest among the targeted audiences and this practice in business is unethical.
2. In my opinion, I think there should be no standardized approach to defining beauty within the international advertising and fashion industry. First and foremost, beauty is natural and there can be no universal yardstick that can be used to measure it. Each individual human being has his or her own expectations of what constitute beauty and this cannot be contested. The issue of beauty mainly emanates from opinionated views of different individuals which cannot be standardised.
The other reason is that we all come from different backgrounds and there are different races across the globe. For instance, there are whites, Indians, Chinese, black as well as Arabic races women from these groups significantly differ. By virtue of the fact that we come from different races, it can be seen that it is impossible to have a universally agreed standard measure of what constitutes a beautiful woman. In each race, the people have their own perceptions and expectations of what a beautiful woman should at least look like. Standardising beauty is just as good as trying to say that biological differences among people do not exist. This is not true since all individuals are characterised by certain biological differences.
References
DesJardins, J. (2006). An introduction to business ethics. 2nd Edition. Boston. McGraw
Hill international Edition.
Kotler, P. & Armstrong, G. (2010). Principles of Marketing. CT: Person.
Robbins, S. P. (1993). Organizational behaviour: Concepts, controversies and
applications. New Jersey. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs.