Corporate Governance & Social Responsibility - Essay Example

Business organizations should not be interested only on the shareholders (tutor2u, 2011, para.4). The employees as well as the users of these products need to be considered in the development of the operational strategies of the organization. The concern addressed here should reflect on the type and quality of product offered to the consumers. While some products have no adverse effect on the social life of the users, others like alcohol drinks and bhang are often associated with serious social issues.

Excessive drinking and drug abuse contribute significantly to other social issues like domestic violence, sexual abuse, or even manslaughter. Product advertisement After developing a product, a business company would always want to let its product be known in the market. This is achieved through extensive promotion and advertisement of the product. The advertisements often appeal to the consumers on the benefits of the product. The contents of the advert will influence its effectiveness (Gunter, Oates, & Blades, 2005, p.123). The adverts explain why the product ranks well above the other products in the market and provide a direction on how to use the product (eHow, 2011, para.1). Largely, the advertisements have significant impacts on the usage of the products.

Researches have shown that exposure to some advert increases the consumption of the advertised product (Gunter, Oates, & Blades, 2005, p.123). Ideally, this objective of advertisement (appealing to the public to buy the product) should apply to those products not associated with social problems. However, for products that influence the society, especially the underage, the advertisements only need to be informative. The adverts should indicate prices of the product as well as where they could be obtained.

For the alcoholic drinks in particular, the advertisements should stress on the targeted age group and emphasis that they should not be sold to underage. The associated health problems also need to be indicated in the adverts and containers of the products. Spykes and the company’ decision to stop its sales It is not appropriate to rule out that Spykes was a bad product. The company studied the market trend that had been recorded in the past. Its development acme about after the company had observed that taste was moving from their traditional domestic brands like Budweiser (Case study, p.497). The product was not developed to attract underage drinkers as per the criticisms.

Instead, it was targeting the drinkers in the age bracket of 21-30 (Case study, p.497). Besides, the product had caffeine additive to improve on its energy content. It also had lower alcohol content than the wine; it had 12% alcohol content. The only mistake that the company did was that they did not emphasize on the age bracket that was targeted by the product. Even though the product was developed to attract the young adults, its sweetest taste was criticized to attract the teenagers. It is assumed that alcoholic drinks with high-energy content are popular among the teenagers (Case study, p.498). The decorations at the website were also seen as appealing more to the teenagers than adults.

After all the criticism that was launched on the product and its advertisement, the company did the right thing to withdraw the product. The so-called “self-appointed” civil activists are very significant influential in the market as