Marketing Ethics – McDonald’s

Marketing Ethics – McDonald’s

Introduction

Marketing ethics defined as an area of moral principles related to ethicality of the operation and ordinance of marketing (Dunfee, Smith and Ross, 1999). In order to boost company’s performance, marketing strategy is of vital importance to promote their brand name. Corporations always want to strike a balance between obtaining higher profit and avoiding improper behavior. However, it is common to find unethical issues in company’s marketing activity. In this essay, I would like to discuss the ethicality of McDonald’s marketing activities which mainly focus on products and its related suggestions.

Background

McDonald’s is the world largest food service retailer with over 36000 outlets in 119 countries around the world. Although McDonald’s is a well-known fast food restaurant in the world, it is found that there are some unethical activities. In 2014, McDonald’s was suffered from rotten meat scandal (Mathew, 2014). McDonald’s imported pork and chicken from Shanghai Husi Food which is a large supplier of raw meat. Chinese government found out that Husi repackaged expired meat and sold to McDonald’s. The Centre for Food Safety halted the sales of infected items, such as chicken nuggets and McSpicy burgers, but still 170 tons of tainted food were sold to customers.

According to American Marketing Association (AMA), companies should follow the ethical values, honesty, responsibility, respect, transparency and citizenship which form a clear guideline for judging; unethical marketing activity will be verified if there is violation of these values. In the mentioned case, McDonald’s violated the ethical values as honesty and responsibility.

Honesty

In terms of honesty, McDonald’s failed to be trustful to their customers and stakeholders. Originally, McDonald’s denied that their food products contained Shanghai Husi’s expired meat (Chan, 2014); however, the government discovered that McDonald’s had imported expired pork and chicken and had already sold to the public. Few days later, McDonald’s admitted their fault and made apology to the public. In this case, McDonald’s failed to be honest when they made mistakes. It is known that there must be records of inputs of raw materials but McDonald’s hid their fault and lied to the public. For this act, McDonald’s might want to maintain their reputation but it resulted conversely as it highly impose negative effect on its prestige by their dishonest act and tainted products.

In order to strive for honesty, McDonald’s should responsible for their mistakes and cooperate with related department to resolve the problem. It is no room for concealing unethical activity they had so McDonald’s should take responsibility in order to restore its credibility.

Responsibility

For responsibility, marketer should strive to serve the needs of customers (O’ Boyle & Dawson, 1992) but McDonald’s failed to satisfy this which resulted in violating ethical value of responsibility. According to McDonald’s (2016), one of the ambitions is to provide foods with good taste, modern choices and1healthy ingredients. In 2014, McDonald’s was discovered that it imported rotten meat and sold to customers which had already went against their ambitions and this incident affected several location, such as Japan, Hong Kong and China. In fact, food made of expired meat undoubtedly harm to human’s health. McDonald’s not only could not serve the basic needs of customers, but also provided harmful food to its customers unethically. Therefore, McDonald’s failed to serve the needs of customers as well as violated the ethical value of responsibility.