Ethics Codes and Sales Professionals' Perceptions of Their Organizations' Ethical Values

Most large companies and many smaller ones have adopted ethics codes, but the evidence is mixed as to whether they have a positive impact on the behavior of employees. We suggest that one way that ethics codes could contribute to ethical behavior is by influencing the perceptions that employees have about the ethical values of organizations. We examine whether a group of sales professionals in organizations with ethics codes perceive that their organizational context is more supportive of ethical behavior than sales professionals in companies without codes. After accounting for the effect of several covariates, our results indicated that sales professionals employed in organizations with codes of ethics perceived their work environments to have more positive ethical values than did other sales professionals.     

Business-to-business selling in the post-COVID-19 era: Developing an adaptive sales force

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how salespeople interact with customers and with business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Organizations must confront the shifts in how their salespeople operate. Recent research recommends firms develop an adaptive sales force to address disruptions like a pandemic and be prepared to meet such challenges in the future. Based on interviews with marketing and sales executives, we explore how firms have responded to these interconnected changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and offer insight into best practices deployed across industries.     

Corporate codes of ethics and sales force behavior: A case study

A growing public concern regarding ethical business conduct has stimulated marketing research in the ethics area. This study is the first empirical research to investigate the relationship between a code of ethics and sales force behavior. The findings present preliminary evidence that a well communicated code of ethics may be related to ethical sales force behavior. Furthermore, it appears that a sales force that is employed in such an environment can be profiled as being relatively high in job performance and receiving equally high satisfaction from their positions. Suggestions are made for future research and recommendations are offered for marketing practitioners.     

Marketing Strategies and the Search for Virtue: A Case Analysis of The Body Shop, International

The authors propose a framework to integrate virtue ethics into marketing theory and apply it to the development of marketing strategies. Virtue ethics, a philosophy that focuses on an individual's moral character, has received limited attention from marketing scholars and researchers. The authors argue that without consideration of virtue ethics a comprehensive analysis of the ethical character of marketing decision makers and their strategies cannot be achieved. They provide an overview of virtue ethics supplemented by a case study of The Body Shop, International to demonstrate how evaluation of the ethics of corporate executives and their marketing strategies is completed by virtue ethics.     

Ethical Perspectives: Are Future Marketers any Different?

The notion of ethics in business continues to receive considerable attention. Many universities and professional organizations have attempted to address the issue of ethics by adding ethics courses to the curriculum and by creating codes of ethics for individuals working in that field. A study of students in Australia has shown that students majoring in marketing are more prone to less-than-ethical behavior than are other students. In an attempt to better understand the attitudes of future marketers in the US, we examine the attitudes of marketing majors interms of an ethical practices code and with respect toa set of ethical value statements. The ethical perspectives of marketing majors are compared to thoseof other business majors. In addition, the effect of taking a course in ethics is examined.     

Codes of Ethics and the Pursuit of Organizational Legitimacy: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions

The focus of this paper is to further a discussion of codes of ethics as institutionalized organizational structures that extend some form of legitimacy to organizations. The particular form of legitimacy is of critical importance to our analysis. After reviewing various theories of legitimacy, we analyze the literature on how legitimacy is derived from codes of ethics to discover which specific form of legitimacy is gained from their presence in organizations. We content analyze a sample of codes to consider the question of whether a strategic, self-interested rationale lies behind the adoption of a code of ethics. We propose that the process of employing codes of ethics in this strategic manner has become, through isomorphism, an institutionalized practice that itself confers a cognitive form of legitimacy to the organization and further distances the codes from their moral foundation.     

Ethics and Marketing on this Internet: Practitioners' Perceptions of Societal, Industry and Company Concerns

The astonishing growth of the Internet coupled with its unique capabilities has captured the attention of the marketing community. Although many businesses are acknowledging the importance of a Web site, to date, little attention has been given to the business community'sperceptions of the ethicality of this new medium. A national sample of marketing executives was surveyed regarding their perceptions of: (1) regulation of the Internet, (2) the potential ethical issues via Internet marketing facing their industry, and (3) the role of ethics and Internet marketing in their organization. Results and recommendations for incorporating Internet ethical guidelines into organizations are discussed.     

Ethics and Social Responsibility in Marketing

ABSTRACT

Ethics are our belief about what is right and wrong. Although these beliefs may vary from one individual to another or one company to another, ethics and business responsibility are an important part to any company's marketing department. The goals of the marketing department are to target an audience, appeal to that audience, and get the audience to purchase that particular product or service. In doing this, a company must make sure that they are first abiding by all laws and regulations, but they should also strive to be sure that they are acting ethically and honestly. One interpretation of morality may vary greatly among individuals, but it still exists.

While the necessity for ethics in business and marketing has been pointed out in numerous sources, many have contended that a good deal of consumer concern is with marketing and its related activities. Within companies, trade organizations, governmental organizations, and professions, one can observe a shift in the way of thinking about codes of ethics. The moral resistance of an organization is referred to as the degree in which the organization can resist the influencing factors, which exercise a downward pressure on the moral content of the organization. The moral content of the organization is the degree in which that organization makes an effort to fulfill its responsibilities with respect to its stakeholders.     

Business and Marketing Ethics as Professional Ethics. Concepts, Approaches and Typologies

Marketing ethics is normally marketed as a sub-specialization of business ethics. In this paper, marketing ethics serves as an umbrella term for advertising, PR and sales ethics and as an example of professional ethics. To structure the paper, four approaches are distinguished, with a focus on typical professional conflicts, codes, roles or climates respectively. Since the moral climate approachis more inclusive than the other approaches, the last part of the paper deals mainly with moral climates, within the above-mentioned marketing sub-professions.     

Reinforcing Lessons for Business from the Marketing Revolution in U.S. Presidential Politics: A Strategic Triad

The role of marketing in presidential politics in the United States has introduced lessons for marketing executives on how to more effectively build up brand loyalty and fend off competition. The same technological breakthroughs in marketing that have powered corporate America were used by the Obama presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 to microtarget potential donors and voters, carry out massive fund‐raising campaigns, and energize a base of citizens through newly minted movements at a level of sophistication not witnessed previously in other sectors. The same techniques continued to be used in the 2016 presidential campaign, and the paradigm shift in marketing put forward in this article is represented with the introduction of a Strategic Triad that integrates the use of Big Data, microtargeting, and social media by organizations in the political, for‐profit, and nonprofit sectors.     

An Inquiry into the Study of Corporate Codes of Ethics

This paper takes its point of departure in an article by Stevens [Stevens, B.: 1994, Journal of Business Ethics 54, 163–171], in which she identified a lack of knowledge regarding how corporate codes of ethics are communicated and affect behavior in organizations. Taking heed of this suggested gap, we review studies on corporate codes of ethics with an empirical content, published since 1994. The conclusion of the review is that we still lack knowledge on how codes work, how they are communicated and how they are transformed inside organizations. Stevens’ plea could even be extended, arguing that the knowledge gap might be of even more significance than in the mid-1990s. Some directions for how this situation can be approached in future studies are outlined in the paper.     

All pain,no gain? Why adopting sales force automation tools is insufficient for performance improvement

The dawning of the 21^st century brought a wave of research into the phenomenon of sales force automation (SFA)—technology tools aimed at enabling sales organizations to better practice customer relationship management. While the academic literature has offered great insight into how an organization can increase the likelihood that its sales force will adopt a new technology system, a great majority of research stops there. This is unfortunate in that companies mistakenly infer that use of an SFA system is the major hurdle and that simply motivating SFA use will be the key to unlocking improved performance. However, this is often not the case; many organizations are able to get their sales force to use an SFA system but do not see improvements in performance. As such, after briefly providing an overview of the factors affecting SFA use, this research provides insight into why use alone may not contribute to long-term improvements in a firm's sales performance. Key empirical findings and theoretical arguments from the extant literature are considered and a list of best practices is offered here to help managers bridge the gap between SFA use and improved sales effectiveness and efficiency.     

Retaining customers in traditional retail financial services: interviewing 'les responsables'

This paper explores organizational concerns with retaining customers in traditional retailing of financial services. Managers, charged with retaining customers ('les responsables') in banks and building societies, are interviewed seeking their views on how their organizations retain customers. The study finds that there are a number of shared themes in the sample of informants, which are evolution/flux, customer information systems, a product/sales orientation, delivering financial services, staff and relationships with customers. Underlying these themes, however, appears some equivocation as these organizations try to retain customers when customer acquisition seems to be the thrust of their marketing.     

Social Responsibility and the Marketing Educator: A Focus on Stakeholders, Ethical Theories, and Related Codes of Ethics

This paper is a commentary on the discussion document by M. Joseph Sirgy (1996) which attempts to develop a marketing educator code of ethics. The authors center their discussion around the concepts of "Social responsibilities in relation to certain publics" and "Social responsibilities in relation to certain actions", as presented in the Sirgy paper, "Certain Publics" issues and "Certain Actions" issues are both examined in light of each of the stakeholder groups, as well as in terms of several ethical theories. Finally, the proposed Academy of Marketing Science marketing educator code of ethics is compared to the ethics codes of other marketing organizations.     

A comparison of business ethics commitment in private and public sector organizations in Sweden

This paper reports the results of a study of the top 500 private sector organizations and the top 100 public sector organizations in Sweden. It is a replication of the study by Svensson et al. (2004) . The aim of the study was to describe and compare the business ethics commitment of organizations across the two sectors. The empirical findings indicate that the processes involved in business ethics commitment have begun to be recognized and acted upon at an organizational level in Sweden. Some support is provided to show that codes of ethics are developing in some of Sweden's largest private and public sector organizations – although this is happening to a lesser extent in the public sector. It is noted that an effect of a code of ethics on the bottom line of the business was acknowledged by respondents in both private and public sector organizations. We believe that the supporting measures of business ethics commitment appear to be underutilized in both private and public sector organizations in Sweden (among those that possess codes of ethics), thus indicating that the commitment to business ethics in Swedish organizations has potential for future development.     

The Impact of Ethics Code Familiarity on Manager Behavior

Codes of ethics exist in many, if not the majority, of all large U.S. companies today. But how the impact of these written codes affect managerial attitudes and behavior is still not clearly documented or explained. This study takes a step in that direction by proposing that attention should shift from the codes themselves as the sources of ethical behavior to the persons whose behavior is the focus of these codes. In particular, this study investigates the role of code familiarity as a factor impacting the influence of an ethics code on manager behavior. Data collected from 286 executives from companies in the direct selling industry are used to test hypotheses (1) that the perceived usefulness of ethics codes is positively related to the degree of familiarity with the code, and (2) that ethical climate as assessed by managers is positively related to the code's perceived usefulness. Both hypotheses are supported, and their implications and further research directions are discussed.     

Practitioners' Perceptions of Ethical Standards in Marketing

Public interest in ethics is becoming increasingly important to marketing practitioners and the marketing profession. Attitudes among practitioners vary about the role of ethnics in marketing today; ethical considerations in marketing practices; and the role of organizational or corporate codes of ethics. This study reports the results of a survey conducted to investigate how marketing practitioners feel about these issues.     

Technology sourcing for website personalization and social media marketing: A study of e-retailing industry

Extant streams of literature on technology sourcing, website personalization and social media marketing are distinct from one another and hence are unable to explain the impact of technology sourcing for website personalization and social media marketing on sales. To address this gap, we use various concepts such as efficiency, adaptability, risks of dependency, lack of quality control, asset-specificity and tacit knowledge to hypothesize the direct effect of technology sourcing on sales as well as the indirect effect through social media performance. Using survey data from 105 U.S. e-retailers, we show that e-retailers using mixed technology sourcing for website personalization have greater sales than e-retailers that use either internally or externally developed technology. On the contrary, e-retailers selecting externally developed technology for social media marketing have greater sales than e-retailers that offer social media marketing that uses either internally developed technology or mixed technology sourcing.