-ABSTRACT-
Advertising business ethics: College students' perceptions vs. advertising professionals
Moon, Young Sook, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor Dept. of Advertising & PR Hanyang University
This study seeks to determine whether important differences exist between the business ethics of marketing and advertising students and of advertising professionals. Student survey was conducted at three major universities and the subjects responded to eleven hypothetical scenarios originally published in Advertising Age in terms of the three response categories - ethical/unethical, what a typical business person would do/not, what you personally would do/not. Students' responses were compared with results from previous surveys of practitioners at advertising agencies. Several significant differences are noted not only between students and professionals but also between student subgroups by gender. For example, practitioners more often than students felt that it is unethical to hire the account supervisor away from a competitor's agency to help pitch the account and to pay a finder's fee to a friend for recommending their company. While this is a fairly common practice in the advertising business, students don't appear to question the practice as much as practitioners do and it seems because they have yet to be exposed to such a practice in the real world. Overall, female students were more likely to find the scenarios unethical than male students. Some of the differences between students and professionals are consistent with the findings from earlier studies in the United States and reinforce the consideration of incorporating ethics courses within the university curriculum.