Target marketing and its Implications
Not what you're looking for?
What are the ethical implications of target marketing in terms of reaching specific groups of consumers?
Choose two groups of consumers and describe how marketers attempt to sell them specific products....
Purchase this Solution
Solution Summary
This solution looks at the ethical implications of target marketing to children and the elderly. It looks into the ethics of advertising.
Solution Preview
Target marketing aims to specify groups of consumers to influence their buying decisions (Stephenson, 2011).
Rittenburg, et. al (1997) in their study of ethical implications of target market selection found out that marketers have been criticized in recent years for their selection of target markets, particularly for targeting disadvantaged or vulnerable segments of a society as markets for potentially harmful products. Despite the public outcry there has been little systematic investigation of this phenomenon.
Believe it or not, most Americans are victims of target marketing forcing them to buy things they do not need. A study of the U.S. Commerce Department suggests that U.S. consumers spent an annualized $1.2 trillion on non-essential stuff including pleasure boats, jewelry, booze, gambling and candy. That's 11.2% of total consumer spending, up from 9.3% a decade earlier and only 4% in 1959, adjusted for inflation. Spending on non-essential stuff was up an inflation-adjusted 3.3% from a year earlier, compared to 2.4% for essential stuff such as food, housing and medicine.
Stephenson (2011) critics target marketing in ...
Purchase this Solution
Free BrainMass Quizzes
Introduction to Finance
This quiz test introductory finance topics.
Marketing Research and Forecasting
The following quiz will assess your ability to identify steps in the marketing research process. Understanding this information will provide fundamental knowledge related to marketing research.
Income Streams
In our ever changing world, developing secondary income streams is becoming more important. This quiz provides a brief overview of income sources.
Organizational Behavior (OB)
The organizational behavior (OB) quiz will help you better understand organizational behavior through the lens of managers including workforce diversity.
Change and Resistance within Organizations
This quiz intended to help students understand change and resistance in organizations