Marketing communication: principles and practice

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Table 17.1
Potential sources of ‘marketing’ abuse
Managerial perspective
Consumer perspective
Most marketing strategies are specific Consumers make decisions across a 
to a single product
range of brand alternatives, and see a 
particular product as part of a larger 
constellation that reflects their 
lifestyle – thus products are related 
that are not related by the respective
marketers
Managers have a vested interest in 
Consumers are interested in 
presenting their own products in the 
evaluating information for their own 
best light and are motivated to do so 
needs – information helps make 
for their own profit – information is a 
better decisions
material for influencing
Competition is viewed as a threat
Competition provides additional 
alternatives, often at lower cost
Source
: Based on Assael, 1995

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THE ETHICAL CONSUMER
Earlier in this book, we saw that consumers may behave in a wholly
unmanageable manner, as rebels and as activists – this is a problem for the
manager who wants to manage consumption-based exchanges (see Gabriel
and Lang, 1995: chapters 8 and 9).
It would be desirable to marketing managers with sales and profit objectives
to accomplish to imagine consumers as malleable, seducible, and manageable
– and convenient if they were so. But much contemporary consumption is
unexpected, creative, and unmanageable. It is not so much that people reject
consumer products or consumption, but rather that appropriations and uses
of products are unorthodox. 
Many centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus recognized that
advertisers were to blame for people’s unhappiness. The bombardment of
offers of satisfaction blurs people’s sense of true needs and desires. For
example, Alain de Botton (2000), claims of a contemporary coffee
commercial, it is the friends we want to buy, not the coffee. Much unreflective
marketing activity does not provide us with the means for happiness as is
often claimed. It is choice that brings happiness, it is friends, freedom, and
reflection, says Epicurian philosophy.
Some principles for a different type of consumption are:
• consume less
• consume local products
• avoid products produced and merchandised by big business
• avoid cash and use alternative modes of economic transaction (for
example, the Local Exchange Trading Schemes – see Box 17.1)
Some have taken to reaffirming the moral and political dimensions of
consumer choice in ethical consumerism. Consumers are urged by activists
to make providers socially responsible by recognizing brand purchase as a