The contemporary marketing environment

The evolution in the contemporary marketing environment and the paradigm shift in the technological milieu have made it easier for marketers to collect information from children and use it for the benefit of their businesses and target young children and youths in several ways. The focal issue in this paper is therefore to explore the role marketing plays in the modern commercial world in form of targeting children and youths in their marketing endeavours.

This is a subject not only of great importance but it has been a point of concern to health professionals, government agencies and ethicists in terms of corporate social responsibility of marketers in their marketing exercises and their influence on the vulnerable who include children, youths and the aged. Therefore in my discussion I will basically restrict my focus on the role of modern marketing in targeting youths and children and in terms of its impact in today’s society. The paper will take two perspectives into consideration: the perspective of the brand manager and that of the ethicist.

The paradigm shift in the marketing exercise has a far reaching impact in the social face of the society especially given that it is mostly targeting children and the youths. DISCUSSION BACKGROUND Marketing should be taken on the point of view of being a societal process aimed at discerning consumer’s wants and targeting to satisfy the wants identified. Marketing has been in existences over decades though it has been on constant shift to embrace and appreciate the changes that take place in the society in terms of consumer preferences and tastes and technological advancement.

Part A: Personal View Children being easy bait, modern marketers are targeting them using the availability of technology like the presence of cell-phones, the internet and other more efficient and modern gadgets. Thus the face of modern marketing is just a reincarnation of the earlier models. The earlier forms however viewed the customer or the employee as mainly aiming (probably unconsciously) to maximize the firm’s performance. This kind of thought is presently far from working as Robert F. et al (2006) observe.

They reiterate that there is sufficient evidence to show that the summative marketing system is far from serving the society as it ought to be, as it fails to fully contribute to the ethical views of love, sex and other social aspects at the national, firm and individual level. It is just another type of guerilla approach where marketers try their best to ensure that their products achieve maximum sales by targeting these vulnerable group who otherwise have no idea factors to consider in product selection and consumption behavior.

That said, marketers have a lot to do in order to achieve sufficient relevance in the society given that marketing is a incessant series of competitive economic and social processes centered on exchange opportunities which involve value propositions which offer to contribute to some amalgamation of national, individual and firm’s well being. In my own view, this is yet to be achieved as even advertising being one major way of marketing tends to be propagandist aiming only to sell the products being advertised at all costs thus typically, it advocates the advertiser’s and seller’s views and perspective.

As a matter of concern, recently the British government kicked off a review on how marketing affects the wellbeing of children and how these children come into contact with marketing and promotion, brands, media and entertainment (Lee, Jeremy April-15-2008). Business ethics is a concept founded on the basis of applied ethics and it scrutinizes ethical principles and ethical or moral problems that can crop up in a business atmosphere. Marketing ethics on the other hand deals with the moral principles behind the regulation and operation of marketing.

Some sections of marketing ethics for example ethics of promotion and advertising have common characteristics with media ethics. These are the basis of an ethicist’s view of the role of marketing targeting to children. If we put this factor into consideration, it is therefore not worth for marketers to target children in their marketing exercise. I strongly believe there would be better decision making and accountability if the marketers targeted the children and youths indirectly by “passing through” the parents- targeting parents.