Navigating the Righteous Course: A Quality Issue

Abstract

This paper argues that the quality of marketing research will be affected in the long term by how successfully the industry is able to implement industry codes of conduct, in particular the revised MRS Code of Conduct. Success will partly depend on understanding the ethical decision-making process of individual researchers to tailor educational programmes. Crucially it will also depend on the extent to which MRS members fulfil the obligation in Code A6 of the current guide ‘to ensure the people with whom they work are sufficiently familiar with this Code of Conduct’. The paper uses Hunt & Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics (1986) as a framework for developing the quality issues and guiding the research, which consisted of a survey of MRS members. This research indentifies the most frequent ethical concerns held by MRS members. The findings also suggest that deontological (‘rules’) influences prevail over teleological considerations (‘consequences’) and that there is a need for a sufficient number of organisations to appoint someone to be responsible for disseminating the Code to non-members, handling queries and enforcing the Code. This will go some way to enhance the quality of marketing research.

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