Comparing Kant's Deontological Ethics Of Advertising To Children

Children are similar to brand new sponges. Kids absorb everything you put in front of them. If you model bad behavior, they reenact the conduct. So, if you put a child in front of a television that exposes bad foods and rebellious behavior, therefore the kid now witnessed a terrible type of habit and could easily decide to mimic it. As an adult, it’s much easier to perceive that television is all acting, but a child’s brain is very vulnerable to anything that appears in front of them. A child is the easiest consumer companies can wield to want their products due to their ignorance upon how the real world works. If an advertising company asks children questions about what types of toys they like, or something like questioning what their favorite kinds of ads are, they wouldn’t see the unethical reasoning behind theses questions. Without a doubt, there certainly should be a limit to how advertisers approach children. The next question is, who is responsible for how much the children get exposed to ads? The answer is not just the company, or parents. Exposure to ads is the accountability to both the markets and parents.

Advertising is the best way to get your brand out to the people around the world, of all ages. Adults should be aware of child advertising and should also be able to expalin to their child why or why not can they have whatever is being advertised.

For-profit corporations increasingly tend to infiltrate (overtly and subliminally) our lives. One example of their interference is marketing strategies aimed at children. Adult consumers are like roaches: they tend to become “immune” to classical marketing strategies and advertisements. Today, corporations tend to by-pass this phenomenon by marketing to children instead: money is indirectly extracted from adults by manipulating their children. There are two main reasons why marketing strategies target children: because of the persuasive power children have over their parents, and because they simply are easier to manipulate. At this point we have to ask ourselves: is it ethical to market to children? Should children be protected from being

Marketing towards children should have some form of restriction. A number of ethical perspectives confirms this fact, which is well elucidated in Stephanie Clifford's "A Fine Line When Ads and Children Mix" which ran in the New York Times. The basic premise for why there needs to be restrictions on advertising aimed towards children is that children do not have the cognitive prowess or development to distinguish between clever marketing and items of consumption that they actually need. This fact holds true not only for food items, but for other items including toys and clothing as well. From a deontological perspective, then, it is inherently wrong or immoral to take advantage of someone, which is what children's advertising is essentially doing. And from a consequentialist perspective, advertising towards children can produce harmful effects. Children lack temperance, and the steady influx of promotional material directed towards them has the proclivity to make them incontinent from a variety of perspectives including that involving the food they eat, to the toys they play with. These unhealthy outcomes would make a consequentialist attempt to regulate advertising towards children.

“The market is interested in getting to that child at the very beginning to begin to shape that’s child’s worldview, to begin to shape that child’s brand preferences.” (Barbaro, Young and Earp) Children are marketer’s main targets because children have young minds and are easy to persuade. Children will be the future consumers of America. They are very vulnerable and are being bombarded with many commercial messages every day. My youngest brother tends to believe everything he watches on TV. One day he came up to my mother and said “Mom you should buy the Charmin toilet paper it’s stronger than all the other toilet papers” he was obviously persuaded by the commercial. Marketers know that a child’s brain is like little a sponge it absorbs everything they hear and see. Marketer’s main goal is to get brand loyalty for life by teaching children that life is about wanting and buying. They want to turn children into lifelong consumers. I do not agree with commercialization of children it does not bring anything positive into their lives. Children commercialization affects the children’s values, mindset, and their future. These advertisements are harming them and some people fail to realize that. Children are being brainwashed with these commercials and being manipulated.

To begin with, marketing to children can cause health problems such as diabetes and obesity. The media is the cause for obesity and diabetes because it promotes junk food over healthy food and directs it at younger children when they are too young to understand the consequences of eating healthy or just do not understand. This leads to child hood obesity, which 16% of children and teenagers are overweight, which is four times the amount it was in the 1960’s (Barbaro, A, 2008). In addition, the health issues you see in adults, are now being seen in 7 year olds for example, type 2 diabetes (Barbaro, A, 2008).

Ethics in advertising has become critical in today’s scandal ridden ere and it affects the practices of human’s lives. Hence ethics is considered most important feature of advertising. Ethical advertising is constantly beneath the scrutiny of the public and shelled with criticism and has been through many moral ethical issues involved in “fair” advertising. Also, unethical practices may endure to raise question from an ethical standpoint. Advertising can bring either positive results or breed negative influence to its consumers; therefore, it is a vital responsibility of professionals to follow high ethical standards in this industry. There is much of critical concentration on advertising towards children in terms of ethics, whereas it effects to young audience can lead towards certain consumers behaviour, which may result into harmful impact on child’s physical and mental health, one such undesirable consequences of child targeted marketing is obesity - so this subject has become important aspect to choose to get more insights on ethical

There are thousands of advertisements aimed to intrigue children, ranging from advertisements on television, in magazines, on social media and in online games. Many of the advertisements are suited to children and don’t introduce ethical dilemmas although some have been considered unethical and as a result have been changed and evan banned from being published or presented. Ethics are moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity. Advertising can represent real ethical crisis’, especially in children’s advertisements. Business use promotional strategies to create interest in customers and as a result maximise sales. Although not all business evaluate the impact that advertisements have on consumers, in particular children, therefore regarding the advertisement as unethical.

Advertising to children began in the 1970s, marketers decided to advertise to children because they can be heavily influenced by commercials (Wilcox, Kunkel, Cantor, Dowrick, Linn, Palmer, 2004). Some believe there are ethical concerns with targeting children, because they are so easily persuaded. Others such as Lalley, senior vice president at Lid-Leo (company specializes in accounts for McDonald’s and Nintendo), believe the commercials are not manipulating children to make purchases, because commercials are just bringing awareness of the product, not convincing children that they need the item. Children or parents have the decision to purchase or not to purchase the product (Campbell, Davis-Packard, 2000). Marketing to children has become increasingly more popular. Businesses spend $17 billion annually to market to this target group, since children under twelve years old influence $500 billion purchases annually, giving companies a remarkable return on investment (Horovitz, 2006). There are several mediums that companies may use to target children to purchase products which include television, radio, internet, books, cell phone applications, and in store tactics.

Many philosophers have represented their views on moral philosophy, with different approaches on how a human being should live his or her life, based on what is right and wrong. Would you perceive a specific action to be moral based on inclination or because it was just a means to an end or because it is what duty requires? Immanuel Kant believes the actions performed as duty requires are the only ones with moral worth. On the other hand, Hume considers morality to come from within, through motivation and actions rather than through reason. This paper aims to prove how Immanuel Kant’s deontology is the absolute ethical system of “moral law”. To demonstrate this, we will explore appropriate arguments given by Kant through his fundamental principles of the metaphysics and Hume’s

As the awareness of ethics and social responsibility have been growing within U.S. corporations the ethical implications of marketing and advertising have become a more prevailing subject, especially that of marketing products directly to children. According to “Marketing and Ethics” ethical marketing seeks to promote honesty, fairness, and responsibility in all advertising (Freeman, Fritz & Mead, 2010). The American Marketing Association has set a statement of ethics in place that is supposed to govern and guide marketer’s actions through their stated ethical values. The six ethical values; honesty, responsibility, fairness, respect, transparency, and citizenship are the representation of the collective idea of desirable and morally correct conduct. (“Statement of Ethics”) These six values of the statement are supposed to set the standard for these companies to measure their marketing actions. These standards of ethics are important for the marketers to keep in mind as advertisement campaigns directed towards children are continuing to grow. According to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, companies spend about 17 billion dollars annually marketing to children. (“Marketing to Children” 2008.) This includes anything from television, product placements, or packaging designs.

The media is not looking out for the best interest of the youth. Advertising in the media can bring upon misinterpretation in a child’s mind. Children are exposed to advertising all day, whether it is on the television, their phone, or advertisements around the city “the advertisers have strategies to advertise their products to children”(Barve G, Sood A, Nithya S, Virmani T). The media puts false images or ideas in their minds making the children believe something that isn’t true. The media does not care how it affects the child, but they should. It affects the children negatively because it is not an accurate depiction of what they are advertising. Furthermore, all the advertising indeed has some effects on children because “research has stated that young children (in an age group of 8

When it comes down to ethical guidelines it is pertinent that every industry have them. However, when consumers think of the marketing industry, they tend to think those are the most unethical people participating in those jobs. Marketing too has some ethical guidelines, but to what extent are they being followed to have consumers thinking otherwise? Marketing is supposed to make honest claims and satisfy the needs and wants of the customers. It is supposed to develop brand loyalty, to in turn increase customer retention, bring in new clientele, and boost company creditability to differentiate it, from its competitors. Unfortunately, that is not the case in parts of the industry where consumers automatically think “unethical” when they hear the word “marketing”. There are many forms of unethical marketing such as; surrogate advertising, exaggeration, puffery, unverified claims, stereotyping women, false brand comparisons, and Children in advertisements. All are which, are pretty common throughout the industry and many are seen being used at the same time during marketing campaigns. Focusing in on children in advertising there are many cases where advertising is targeted to exploit the innocence in children. Advertising to children may be very attractive to marketers because of the impression advertisements tend to make on them, which affects their future purchasing decisions and those around them. “Children are a lucrative market” According to McGee (1997, p. 52). Children

From the start of the medieval times the use of advertising has been in use, whether it was a way to inform the people, capture a thief or raise taxes. By the industrialization age of promoting new cars through advertisement, advertising has changed the way the whole world operates with the introduction of new and improved items. Today “United States has become the largest advertising market in the world (Statista). Advertising is a part of everyday life that can target different age groups because it helps companies promote new products, but is advertising ethical? Advertising is not ethical because it targets children persuades people into buying products they don’t need, causes woman to form unrealistic body images, and persuades people into buying products they don’t need.

Dr. Raghbir Singh* Sandeep Vij** Abstract Depending upon the public opinion about the social, economic and ethical aspects of advertising, the marketers and the public policy makers should take different stances on how advertising should be treated. The study has analyzed in detail the public response to the issues like: ‘Targeting Children in Advertising’, ‘Use of Sex in Advertisements’, ‘Promotion of Materialism through Advertising’, ‘Use of Comparative Advertising’, ‘Ethics in Advertising’, ‘Use of Celebrities in Advertising’, ‘Economic Effects of Advertising’; and ‘Public Policy on Advertising’. The population for the study comprised a sample of 900