Conscientious Marketing and Martech Ethical Challenges (2225.YR.014570.1)

General information

Type:	OPT	Curs:	1	Period:	S semester
ECTS Credits:	3 ECTS

Teaching Staff:

Group	Teacher	Department	Language
Year 1	Joaquín Calaf Cot	Esade	ENG

There are no prerequisites.

Participants in this course should be familiar with the marketing principles and subjects already taught in the program.

There are many reasons for starting a company, a business enterprise, or an NGO. It can be the will of solving a problem for society. To transform a passion for an activity into a business that can sustain a way of life. To give a chance to humanity to colonize Mars. Or to find a way to feed one-self and one's family...
Regardless of the motivation, successful ones will survive, grow, and maybe thrive in a human society and a business environment, in which they will operate following implicit or explicit rules, defined by moral, or what is considered right or wrong in a society on a given period of history.
These rules, be laws, codes of conduct or tradition have evolved through centuries and millennia to bring us to the level of wellbeing, knowledge, safety and culture that we enjoy now, by allowing us to collaborate and share goals on a broad scale, and slowly distribute the benefits of our collaboration among the human species.
But even if we have made a lot of progress, there are still many challenges to be solved: environmental, inequality, fairness, transparency, health or other. Our societies are evolving to demand ever more involvement of brands and companies to solve these challenges.
This course will explore the interactions between moral and the activity of marketing and branding, and it will uncover the challenges that new technological development is posing to our ethical thinking and decision making.
While in all the other courses of this program you will learn what can be achieved in marketing to drive the success of an organization forward, in this course we will discuss whether it should be done. Where should we draw the limits of what we can do. And we will find out that this is maybe the toughest decision to make.

1) We will learn what is Moral and Ethics, and which main ethical philosophies influence our decision-making. We will build a framework for ethical decision making and we will discuss its application to many different real marketing situations in class, individually and in groups.

2) We will explore the growing demand for responsible behaviour of brands and companies in our societies and how this demand is expressing itself in changes in consumers purchasing behaviour, regulators decisions, employee engagement and even financial markets and investment decisions from large financial institutions like Blackrock or successful businessmen and philanthropists like Warren Buffet.

3) We will outline how these trends generate opportunities to marketeers to create and grow successful brands, by aligning the brand purpose and the interests of its stakeholders. We will discuss how brand purpose can drive brand growth, customer and employee loyalty and provide a framework to analyse, identify and develop a successful brand purpose throughout time, "doing good by doing well?.

4) But brand and company behaviour, for it to work in the long term, must be authentic to be able to drive customer and employee loyalty and commitment, not just a game of smoke and mirrors. It should impregnate the whole corporate governance and decision-making process. Therefore, we will provide a Conscientious Marketing model to align brand purpose and corporate behaviour that is comprehensive of all stakeholders.

5) We all operate with limited resources in an environment beyond our control. In these circumstances, decision making is difficult. Even when we have clear long-term goals, we must make decisions lacking relevant information or we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. We will discuss a process to make these decisions in a conscientious way and how to include ethical considerations in our marketing and branding decision making process.

6) However, even if purpose is aligned with stakeholders' values and brands and companies are managed with them in mind, who decides what is and what is not a valid "good purpose?? We will define what ethics is and outline the ethics systems we are operating under and the moral values that underscore it. Society and the globalized world is not a homogeneous place, and different and contradictory moral principles and ethics systems coexist. Goals and outcomes that are desirable in a situation, location or for a group of people, can be unacceptable for others.

7) Finally, the expansion of our knowledge and the fast pace of technological innovation brings us many great benefits, but it is also creating new ethical challenges that society is not yet equipped to tackle. It poses risks our current ethics and regulation is ill equipped to mitigate. As we better understand how our brain, our behaviour or society works (through neuroscience, or behavioural economics, i.e.), we have more control of the products and experiences we are building, and we can rapidly discover and scale successful strategies through data networks, IA and personal devices. We can assume that marketeers can affect behaviour more effectively than ever, for good or for bad. Professional groups that have traditionally been perceived as to have powerful outcomes on lives of people or the good workings of society like medical doctors or journalists operate under strict codes of ethics, some going back thousands of years like the Hippocratic oath.Despite marketeers lack a historical code of ethics, science and technology is giving us an ever-increasing power: we will explore and identify the ethical challenges this power poses and discuss how a conscientious marketeer should address them.

The course uses a collection of articles, case studies and news articles. These materials will be made available before the course starts

Group	Teacher	Department
Year 1	Joaquín Calaf Cot	Esade