Finger Hut Strategy

“Business ethics is the application of ethical values to business behavior. It applies to any and all aspects of business conduct, from boardroom strategies and how companies treat their employees and suppliers to sales techniques and accounting practices. Ethics goes beyond the legal requirements for a company and is, therefore, about discretionary decisions and behavior guided by values. Business ethics is relevant both to the conduct of individuals and to the conduct of the organization as a whole.” With this statement can we say that Fingerhut’s price strategy is unethical? In order to answer this question we need to digest certain issues of “Fingerhut’s Price Strategy” case with the point of views of Roger Crisp “autonomy and creation of desire” and Milton Friedman’s “capitalism and social responsibilities.” Has Fingerhut exploited the low-income consumers by using unfair and deceptive marketing techniques? Roger Crisp would indefinitely assert that certain question as being true. He would say that Fingerhut had purposely targeted the low-income customers with the motives that they have recognized that there was less challenged present to manipulate them with their persuasive advertisements. Fingerhut would be seen by Crisp as a creator of desires upon the low-income customers. As stated in the case, Fingerhut had built an extensive database about their customers including age, martial status, hobbies, number of children, and birthdays. Crisp would take the fact that they had all that information from their customers that it would be easy for Fingerhut to know what people unconsciously might need and used that information to mail “specialized” catalog to its customers to create those desires upon them. Desires that would influence the customers to want to buy and make it difficult to refuse those offer within the catalog that had easy low monthly or weekly payments. If the catalog were not mailed, those consumers would have not had the desire to buy those