Corporate Consumer Responsibility

Before corporations and businesses dip their hands to contribute to the society, they have to make sure they have responsibilities to the welfare of the most important aspect of their business, the consumers. After tackling the Ford-Firestone case and pointing out different ethical issues like the labor issues and their inability to disclose information to the public, it all boils down to one question – what is your responsibility to consumers? What duty do we have to our buyers to make sure we don’t take advantage of the consumers being misinformed?

Before even selling, we need to make sure our products (or services) are safe enough to be consumed by millions of people. In the Ford-Firestone case, consumers do not know that a tire problem exists in Ford Explorers that could cause a rollover and could (and had) cause countless casualties. Ford did not just undisclose these facts, but they could’ve done better testing to check its reliability especially that the lives of the people are at risk.

 

When it comes to advertising, we also have a responsibility to persuade, but not manipulate. Being a part-time financial advisor trainee, I was able to open my eyes on different techniques of selling – which unfortunately, involves deception at seldom times. Since I work at a life insurance company, insurance is a tough product to sell to consumers, especially when the majority of the market is not financially literate. A deceptive example would be presenting to potential clients his/her financial needs through Living on Interest financial planning process. It involves determining your needed amount to provide for the family assuming that the only means for you to earn regularly is through interests. So if your monthly income is Php50,000, and the interest rate is at 4%, then you will need at least Php15M worth of cash to sustain your basic needs. This process could be effective because for it could trigger people’s sense of urgency to get a life insurance and mutual fund as early as possible and convince them to contribute large amounts as much as possible to meet the need. Though this may be still be beneficial in the long run, convincing them that they need a large amount of money just to sustain current needs is just wrong because of several reasons: one – it assumes that the only way for you to earn would be to rely on interests alone and two – it is not okay for you to touch the Php15M because it will impact your monthly minimum earnings. From the beginning, I knew that this style of computation is very deceiving so I committed to myself not to present this kind of presentation.