CHAPTER TWO OF THE EFFECT OF UNETHICAL MARKETING PRACTICES ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK  

2.1.      Conceptual Marketing

This chapter basically outlined and explained some key concepts used in this study and also examines the contributions of some experts, practitioners and scholars toward the effect of unethical marketing practices advertising campaigns in Nigeria.

Categorically, it evaluates the extent of effectiveness of their contributions in solving problems created by unethical marketing practices advertising campaigns. There is no doubt that these contributors have, from time to time, analyzed the importance, highlighting its laid down principles.

 Unethical Marketing Practices Advertising Campaigns  can have negative impact a business, by damaging the business credibility, brand, reputation and potentially causing significant loss of customers and potential business failure Abayomi (2006)

Effect: means something that brought about by a cause or agent, a result, it is the power to produce an outcome or achieve a result.

Unethical: means not connected with beliefs and principles about what is right and wrong. It is not morally correct acceptable. It is means of promoting advertising.

Practice: it means that it is a way of doing something that is usual or expected way in a particular organization or situation.

Advertising: it is a form of communication intend to persuade if viewers, readers or listeners to take some action.

It is an exciting, dynamic, and challenging enterprise. Its often pervasive, fascinating and materialistic nature makes it an object of criticism and misunderstanding.  Advertising is also a profession in which a body of experts in involved in the conceptualization, planning, creating, packaging and placing of advertisements on the media (Bovee and Arens, 2006).

2.2.      Marketing Ethics and Code of Conduct

Marketing ethics and code of conduct is concerned with the application of ethical consideration to marketing decision making (Bittner, 2008). Ethics and code of conduct in marketing can also be considered as a moral judgment and behaviour standards in marketing practices or moral code or system in marketing area (Nnanyefugo, 2009).   Marketing ethics and code of conduct is the research of the base and structure of rules and conduct, standards and moral decision relating to marketing decision and practices.

Society expects reasonable ethical conduct on the part of business executive as they make decisions that affect the lives of other people. Moral standards are expected from businesses. Therefore, marketing executives who take strategic decisions are often face with ethical conditions and their decisions are related to all sides of marketing mix as product, price, place and promotion (Obodoeze, 2012).   Ethics, with its various branches, is the major type of practical disciplines that tries to help us decide on how one should act not just in order to attain a given objective or objectives but, rather, all things considered (Okunna, 2008).

The need for ethics arise from the desire to avoid real-life problems, it does not address issues of what you should or should not believes, instead ethics deals with principles that guide human behaviour . Moral and ethics fall within the disciplines of axiology, a branch of philosophy, that deals with the theory of human values (Ozo, 2012).  

Ozo (2012), asserts that ethics has been broadly and simply defined as the study of how individual or group decisions affect other people. While Osunbiyi (2006) added that ethics is a set of moral principles or values used by organizations to steer the conduct of the organization itself and its employees, in all their business activities in relation to the outside world.

2.3  Unethical Marketing Practices in Nigeria

Reports from Nigeria’s petroleum regulatory agencies and other sources point to a high level of unethical practices of petroleum marketers in the country. According to the DPR, the department has been inundated with complaints from the public on the arbitrarily fixing of petrol prices above the government approved rates by marketers and perennial incidences of fuel adulteration in the country over the years, causing deaths, deformities and incalculable damages to consumers of the petroleum products in the country (Obodoeze, 2012).  

Only in 2012, the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) sealed 294 filling stations for various offences in Lagos (NAN, 2012). This was also accompanied with series of sanctions on several petrol stations in other states for selling above approved pump prices and adulteration of petroleum products (May, 2015; NAN, 2015; Naija.com, 2014).

According to a DPR (2014) report, the nation’s petroleum products market is currently flooded with adulterated products, Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), admitted on Thursday, July 25, 2014. Products like Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), also known as petrol, and Automobile Gas Oil (AGO), or diesel, are commonly used for domestic and automobile, and their adulteration usually causes explosion that result in social and economic catastrophe said the report.

The Director-General, Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON), said a nationwide sampling conducted by SON on Petroleum products showed a high level of adulteration at different levels of distribution.  For instance, In 2007, following the reduction of the pump price of petrol to N65, while the street price of kerosene dangled between N140 to N150, many unscrupulous marketers started mixing kerosene with petrol, leading to kerosene explosion in many parts of the country. In the process many Nigerians met their untimely deaths, while hundreds sustained indelible injuries (Okunna, 2008).

This unethical marketing has gone unabated by petroleum marketers and other organizations in Nigeria. One thing is certain, their actions is not in the spirit of marketing which revolves on the satisfaction of consumer’s wants and needs, with the aim of maximizing profit, while advocating society’s long term best interest (Bel-Molokwu and Obiaku 2011). 

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