A Study on Customer Attitude Towards Ethics Followed in Advertising

Advertising is not a matter of thinking up cute pictures or writing clever slogans, but a serious business tool. The ultimate purpose of advertising is to assist in the selling of the product. Advertising is the communication relayed from companies to persuade an audience to purchase their products. From a marketing context, advertising could be defined as "a paid form of non-personal communication about an organization and/or its products that is transmitted to a target audience through a mass medium." Therefore it is one kind of promotional activity, separate from publicity, sales promotion and personal selling. Today, audiences have well-developed advertising savvy, and they can no longer interrupt people with inane, uninteresting advertising designed to "push product." This neither captures their attention, nor their purchase decisions. Ethics is the most important feature of the advertising industry. Though there are many benefits of advertising but then there are some points which do not match the ethical norms of advertising. An ethical advertisement is the one which does not lie, doesn’t make fake or false claims and is in the limit of decency. Nowadays, advertisements are more exaggerated and a lot of puffing is used. It seems like the advertisers lack knowledge of ethical norms and principles. Advertisers just don’t understand and are unable to decide what is correct and what is wrong. Ethics also depends on what people believe. If the advertisers make the advertisements on the belief that the customers will understand, persuade them to think, and then act on their advertisements, then this will lead to positive results and the advertisement may not be called unethical. KEY WORDS: Advertising, Ethics, Marketing, Belief