How Important Company’s Ethics, Brand Image?

Ethics in Integrated Marketing Communication: Fair Trade is a lot about Image - Nowadays, consumers be more critical in terms of company’s ethics. The fact says that consumers have bought a product or a service because of a company’s responsible reputation De Pelsmacker, Driesen, & Rayp (2005). For instance, turning into fair trade marketer believe that it can be as a good way to boost reputation and sales. It clearly be seen that if a company can develop their ethics into something positive, it can be automatically creating positive message amongst their target market.

In my opinion, when a company try to concern about certain ethical issue like environmentally friendly products or even animal well-being, it can attract the consumers behaviour. Let’s take a look “The Body Shop” as a brand that avoid animal testing make the brand having positive image in publics-eye. People who have concern about animal well-being issue will trust and buy their product rather than others. It means that consumers with same perception of ethics will only believe about what the company has done. Then, As the case study found that product with positives messages are viewed better than product with negative environment messages I would say that it is true as an absolute reason to keep consumers trust with our brand with maintain the environment.

When a company already has positive environment information, it is easy to persuade consumers in future by maintaining our message. Yet, the challenge is about consumers itself which is some of them still haven’t concern about using product with good ethics. In my personal experience, I found that company with ethical label have more expensive in terms of price rather than other brands, I think this is one of the reason why consumers still not ready to use ethical label since the price is really high. Now all marketers should think how to tackle this problem by having plan of creating the best way to build better understanding about what happened with the expensive price with great benefits for our environment, legal stuff, and also labour right. With the high-intensity of social media, I think we can use social media for sounding and promoting ethics to increase consumers awareness of ethics.

To sum up, ethical label is a great way to build reputation and also increase sale for special target market who have same concern about ethical issue such as environment, animal, labour right etc. Marketers should create positive environment by delivering positive message either by social media or direct message to consumers for keeping consumers’ trust with the brand.

Reference: De Pelsmacker, P., Driesen, L., & Rayp, G. (2005). Do consumers care about ethics? Willingness to pay for fair‐trade coffee. Journal of consumer affairs, 39(2), 363-385.