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After reading the article “How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did” you start to question and wonder, "What happened to the code of ethics here?" This kind of data analyzing is cause for ethical concern. Target is definitely on a “no boundary” movement by prying into people’s lives like this. Even with saying they are “studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy” in the end they are being invasive. This becomes unethical because now you are getting into people’s personal lives and causing problems. This is a happy time for women and they want to share that news, not have Target or another retailer do it for them. They have the right idea in creating helpful ways to make this process easier but they are going about it the wrong way.
This type of marketing is cause for ethical concern because they are abusing the safeguarding of private and confidential information, like credit card, name, or mailing address. Most retailers save that information to send you deals and update you on new items, not categorize you and start sending you coupons because of what they “think” you want to receive. As a consumer I wont sign up for anything, not only at Target, but anywhere else because I lost trust in the company. By singling out pregnant women it makes them a target and companies should not be singling their customers out. I find it unethical that that’s the one group they could focus on. They could have had ads for just women, women who work out, men, children, etc but they chose a specific group: pregnant women.
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The Target manager’s ethical obligation was to apologize on behalf of the company “The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.” I believed he fulfilled his obligation, especially when he called again after the first apology. Although the manager didn’t exactly know and was confused by the fathers outrage, he is the face of the company and still has to take the blame. The manager showed communitarianism because he knew his company was wrong and there was an angry father/customer out there. He also showed emotion by caring. If he did not care he would not have called back this angry customer. He cares about his job and his customers.
Target’s ad mixing of coupon books is still unethical because they still tried to get these pregnant women to buy by getting “sneakier” and making the baby ads random by mixing ads. If Target knows that looking up your first date on Google or Facebook is “stalking” and “creeps people out” (which it does by the way), why get “sneakier” and let these women believe it’s random? To me, this only means they are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong, which is why they even declined NY Times writer Charles Duhigg access to their headquarters and were against his article.
Advertisers and PR practitioners are supposed to help build trust between companies and customers: this does not do that. Some more values in the code of ethics for PR professionals are to “protect confidential and private information” and “work to strengthen the public’s trust in the profession”. Target used private information to create these coupons, and they lost the public’s trust. In Bok’s ethical decision-making process, Target can find another way that is acceptable to achieve this goal of trying to reach pregnant women. Not every woman getting pregnant is a teen girl who doesn’t tell her father, there are some grown responsible women out there anxious to tell their loved ones, and target shouldn’t take that away with coupons targeted at them because “target knows before it shows”. The excitement of pregnancy starts in announcing, no one should take that away!
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