From the customer’s standpoint, public relations should inform and persuade but they should not offend and hurt personal and national feelings of a particular target audience. Ethical decisions in PR campaigns deal with careful selection of messages, images and word choice directed to a particular customer. PR furnishes information, calls attention to some clues and not others, changes attitudes and opinions, relates products to consumer need, gives consumers support for their decisions, affects the intensity of desires, and thereby generates action. This is evidenced in such issues as truth in PR, price fixing, price discrimination, a variety of sales and merchandising tactics, incomplete marketing information, truth in lending, branding and labeling decisions, and implied product warranties. Ethics in Kudler’s Fine Food is concerned not with what marketing behavior is but with what it ought to be. Its domain is standards of behavior in marketing decisions and actions — in the implementation of marketing policies and strategies. It indicates that decisions should be based on mores (which change through time), natural law, or divine law; that it is indeed difficult to obtain universal agreement on norms of ethical behavior; and that the application of different norms can lead to conflicting results. A code of relative marketing ethics or situation ethics, ethics applicable to particular sets of circumstances and reflecting the individuals involved in a decision, may govern in certain decisions. Permanent, objective, ethical standards are not available. What was deemed ethical at the turn of the century need not be today, and today’s ethical decision may be tomorrow’s unethical solution. In achieving its sense of broad community interest and participation, Kudler’s PR performs its social role in two ways. First, marketing faces social challenges in the same sense as the government and other institutions. But unlike the government, marketing finds its major social justifications through offering commercially unified application of the results of technology to the marketplace for a profit in the form of product-service mixes (Crawford 2003).
A Market Research Plan
1. Problem identification – the aim of market research will be to determine motivation and intentions of buyers. Motivation, though important to consumption and helpful in explaining consumer reactions, need not be the only governing force. It refers to only one means by which behavior is initiated or aroused.
2. Selection of the target group (males and females between 20-45 years old)
3. Selection of research method (primary data collection; random sampling)
4. Data gathering
Interviewing of potential customers (development of questionnaire)
Competitors’ analyses (identification of information to be gathered for research, source of information) (Information about competitors’ plans and decisions furnishes highly useful intelligence. This is especially important for new product development.)
5. Data analysis – software will be used to analyze the research results. Position intelligence derives from analysis of relative data concerning market and industry position. Through such analysis, management is able to gain a good view of the company’s relative costs, profits, and rates of return — its position in the industry and marketplace.
6. Summary of results
This raw material consists of facts, attitudes, opinions, observations, and experiences. Through a process of sorting, classifying, indexing, excerpting, and verifying the data, Kudler’s Food will go from the mere gathering of data to the acquisition of information. Through this primary analysis, data become marketing information for PR campaign (Blankenship et al 1998).
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