Old school or new cool?
Marketing profession, codes and ethics and training
Can the profession of marketing learn faster than the society it serves?
The issues for professional marketing relate to the speed of development. Wider business ethics may define how a company integrates core values of honesty, trust, respect, and fairness into its policies, practices, and decision-making. Organisational ethics may also involve an organisation's compliance with legal standards and adherence to internal rules and regulations.
Today, a growing number of companies are designing values-based, globally consistent programs that give employees a level of ethical control that allows them to make appropriate decisions, even when faced with new challenges. At the same time, the scope of organisation ethics programmes has expanded to encompass a company's actions with regard not only to how it treats its employees and obeys the law, but to the nature and quality of the relationships it wishes to have with stakeholders: including shareholders, customers, business partners, suppliers, the community, the environment, indigenous peoples, and even future generations.
Marketing needs to develop its involvement in organisational governance and reputation management based on a set of professional principles related to the ethics and sustainability of professional thinking. It needs to re-invent itself as a key discipline for linking organisational and environment change, and for protecting the value of intangible assets and organisational relationships.
New measures of human and environmental performance will increasingly be integrated into marketing research and the valuation of key intangible assets such as brands.
Marketing should become more involved with stakeholder relationships as well as specifically with customers and be responsible for measurement and assurance of these relationships based on well regarded marketing theories of the life-time value of the customer and the model long-term valuation of customer relationship management.
Information and communications are also of critical concern for marketers, however, marketing must be ready to accept the demands for transparency and accountability that go with the vast power of information management systems, and the great responsibility that goes with resource management of new economy assets. Demands for greater responsiveness are driven by potential customers and shareholders and business organisations are becoming more sensitive to the perception of their license to operate - defined not by the organisation alone, or even by industry regulators, but by a broad and systematically informed society itself.
Marketing can learn from other management disciplines that have engaged with ethical and sustainable thinking and add value though professional development and training for new management processes, that link ethical reasoning with suitable management systems and that gradually re-position the marketing profession as the key discipline for integrating innovation and new business relationships within the business.
Marketing might then re-establish its role of facilitating and regulating organisational activity rather than positioning itself more tactically and less crucially as a key discipline of strategic management. In doing so, marketing can offer business organisations a professional management discipline founded on key principles that are agreeable to both the old and new economy. As such, marketing will offer a service that puts people at the heart of the knowledge organisation and positions both internal and external relationships as THE key management and strategic asset of the organisation.