How has the evolution of the internet and ethics changed the practice of marketing communication - Essay Example

eception doctrine has been relatively easier to substantiate compared to unfairness, and this is specifically applicable for electronic media (Johnson & David, 1996; Who’s Watching the Web, www.aaf.org/relations/onlineprivacy.htm). The current study seeks to evaluate the evolution of the internet and ethical and their implications on the practice of marketing communication. It presents the factors which are perceived as unethical by internet consumers, and the significant predictors of consumers’ evaluations of fairness and ethicality.

The following section presents the review of related literature. The components of the unfairness doctrine suggest that an organization is in discordance only when “injury” is sustained as an outcome of the marketing communication under contention. A critical issue has been borne out of the tangibility of the requirements to justify injury, and the intrinsic intangibility of the internet. Particularly, this has reinforced the ability to concretely link an organization’s marketing activities on the internet to a monetary or physical injury inflicted on the consumers.

This challenge has caused the FTC to dedicate substantial attention and energy to drafting standards for internet marketing communications, in that claims to consumers must be adequately justified through research. However, the issue remains regarding how such a policy that is drafted in the present will be transferable to unfairness issues in the future (McGrath, 1999). The FTC has very distinguished and specific principles and guidelines with regards to determining when marketing communications have committed a violation of fairness.

The original policy has been drafted on December 18, 1980, with the intention of precluding “unfair…acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Drafting a list that stringently expressed that all that is considered “unfair” would be unproductive due to very dynamic and fast changing market conditions in each industry.