Title: Reading: (CU4 M1) Businesses and the Legal Environment
Course: SkillsCom BA 223 16.0 > Section: Credit Unit 4 Module 1 - Creating a Marketing Plan

Similar to social responsibility, ethical behavior in business is a win-win situation. Ethical behavior benefits the organization (company) and the stakeholders (customers, supplies, employees and the community). Ethical questions can arise in many different situations in the content of marketing, and marketers are well advised to examine the ethics of their decisions as they develop a marketing plan. For example is there truth in advertising? Is the sourcing of materials ethical and something that marketers can promote as part of the value package? Or is the sourcing of materials unethical and likely to lead to bad public relations for the organization? Does the salesforce operate in an ethical manner?

Your assigned Readings provide a brief introduction to business ethics and a case study of unethical business behavior.

You will find the ideas of ethics, social responsibility (presented in the previous Credit Unit), and law (presented in the next Module) interact and overlap in many ways. For a marketer the most important thing the three concepts have in common is they should all be taken into account when developing a marketing plan.

Read the following Sections in Advanced Business Law and the Legal Environment (PDF)

- Why Should an Individual or a Business Be Ethical? (p. 51-52)
- Josephson's Core Values Analysis and Decision Process (p. 62-63)
- Josephson's Core Values Model (p. 65-68)
- Managing by Numbers: The Sears Auto Center Story (p. 77-78)