Body Shop's Ethical Strategy Case Study

Ethical business is built on relationships. Ethical activity is concerned with human activity and so is business. From this perspective bad ethics is bad business – customers, suppliers and employees ultimately all leave. Ethical business would consider the following issues while pursuing business strategy; involvement in the community, honesty, truthfulness and fairness in marketing, use of animals in product testing, agricultural practices e.g. intensive farming, the degree of safety built into product design, donation to good causes, the extent to which a business accepts its alleged responsibilities for mishaps, spillages and leaks, the selling of addictive products e.g. tobacco and involvement in the arms trade, trading with repressive regimes. Ethical issues arising from internal and industry practices are a follows; treatment of customers - e.g. honoring the spirit as well as the letter of the law in respect to warranties and after sales service, the number and proportion of women and ethnic minority people in senior positions, the organization’s loyalty to employees when it is in difficult economic conditions, employment of disabled people, working conditions and treatment of workers, bribes to secure contracts and child labor in the developing world and business practices of supply firms. Unethical business strategies would simply involve the following unethical practices; pricing lack of clarity in pricing, dumping – selling at a loss to increase market share and destroy competition in order to subsequently raise prices, price fixing cartels, encouraging people to claim prizes when they phoning premium rate numbers, “bait and switch” selling - attracting customers and then subjecting them to high pressure selling techniques to switch to an more expensive alternative, high pressure selling - especially in relation to groups such as the elderly, counterfeit goods and brand piracy, copying the style of packaging in an attempt to mislead consumers,