Marketers need to carry out ethical market research every time they decide to research the market.
This article talks about issues of conducting ethical market research and examples of unethical market research practices.
Tips for conducting ethical market research
These four requirements form the guiding principles to follow when carrying out market research:
1. Objective. Market research needs to be unbiased and market researchers needs to be objective in their work. Ethical market research requires them to avoid any prejudice when planning, collecting, processing, analyzing and reporting market research information. It is because any prejudgments or favoritism could lead to establishing unrepresentative sample or asking misleading questions that would produce distorted answers. Therefore, marketers need to reasonable not to carry out a biased research. Otherwise, the findings could be manipulated in favor of personal preferences.
2. Honest. Market research needs to be conducted honestly and presentation of findings must be truthful as well. Marketers need to be trustworthy in all steps of the market research process and act ethically. Acting ethically in all attempts to collect useful data and information will establish trust with respondents. Being truthful will prevent plagiarism, lack of referencing, distorting research findings, etc. In many countries market researchers need to follow laws and regulations when carrying out market research as dishonesty would be regarded as unlawful.
3. Transparent. Marketers need to be clear about the market research purpose, the market research process and the way how data and information will be used and processed. Any deceptive practices or using misleading methods will pose a serious ethical problem for the business. Some actions that could lack transparency include not telling respondents that they participate in the market research, using surveillance cameras to secretly observe people, collecting personal information without prior agreements, etc.
4. Confidential. Ethical market research should not invade privacy of participants nor breaching confidentiality. Marketers should not access confidential insights for gaining any personal benefits. Because researchers have access to customer information, any unauthorized use would infringe a customer’s privacy rights. And any unauthorized disclosure of customer information to the third party would indeed be considered unethical.
5. Sensitive. As market researchers have access to private information, they must protect the people in their research samples by ensuring that the information collected is never used for harmful purposes. Personal information of respondents should never be shared without permission. Also, marketers need to be culturally sensitive not to offend others due to cultural differences. While in some cultures, people consider white lies to be totally appropriate in order to save face, researchers should also take this aspect into consideration.
In summary, marketing activities, especially of large public limited companies, have a huge impact on perceptions of the whole society. If business stakeholders perceive any of the market research practices to be unethical, the business will face public criticism, damages to the brand or even legal repercussions.
You can read more about ethics in marketing in my other article called Let’s Hear It for Ethics in Marketing.
