Podcast Transcript

 

Good day and welcome to the podcast! Our theme today is ethics in the business world.
There has been an upheaval as of late about private and corporate sponsorship of research that is self-serving and skewers public awareness towards incentives for profit or propaganda. From Coca-Cola’s funding for a health advocacy nonprofit, stressing the importance of exercise over diet control in weight loss, to the chemical company Monsanto having a significant part in agriculture and production. This begs the question of conflicted research used for advertisement and publicity. On the topic of marketing and ethics in the business world with me here is professor Ronald Kline. professor Kline, how is ethics viewed in the business world and how does it impact decision making compared to other sectors of the corporate profession? ethics in business is a really a bit of a conundrum from when business began hundreds if not thousands of years ago. We lived in a world where it is always buyer beware. someone sells you something, its is your responsibility to make sure what you were getting is what you expected. in the modern world since the 18-1900s, there is something called brand loyalty, and what companies discovered was that it was more important to have a long term relationship with the client than a one-off relationship with the client. automobile industry for example, if ford sells you a car and know that they were going to sell you another car, and another car, and another car, that was more beneficial from a profit standpoint than selling you a car that was going to disappoint you because it wasn’t properly manufactured. So i would say ethics is a bit of an evolution as far as business is concerned. Alright well that is all we have time for today. thank you so much for joining us. we will pick this up on another note. and there you have it. ethics in the business world is a conundrum and it is up to us as consumers to decide where our money goes.