Understanding Marketing Ethics

Marketing ethics revolves around maintaining integrity and transparency while pursuing sales and growth. Once compromised, ethical standards can seldom be restored, as tarnished reputations can spread quickly and affect a business's credibility. Vanity metrics, such as likes and shares, can lead businesses to make unethical choices in pursuit of popularity, prompting them to engage in practices that undermine their integrity. For instance, businesses may resort to 'freebooting,' where they claim viral content as their own without crediting the original creators, thus sacrificing their ethical standing for inflated engagement.