Is it ethical to use women as a marketing instrument?

Mass media plays a great part in our lives. Television, newspapers, magazines surround us

everywhere every day of our lives. All of them are stuck with different kinds of ads. But how

often do we pay attention to the real sense of those ads and the ways the advertisers try to sell

various products to us? There have been growing concerns about and critics toward the usage of

women as a sexual object in marketing practices. However, firms are still using women as an

instrument to attract consumers. This paper examines some business ethics theories to determine

whether firms’ use of women as a marketing instrument is ethical or not. The deductions from

the business ethics theories suggest that it is unethical to abuse women in marketing practices.

In today’s business world, women are used as an object to attract consumers’ attention to the

products that firms sell. They are exploited as a marketing instrument in a wide range of firms’

activities. Women appear as a sexual object in any kind of advertisement or as an attractive

material standing nearby a product. Sometimes firms use sexual saleswomen to facilitate the sale

or to attract consumers’ attention to the firm or product.

Particularly, it is very common to use sexually attractive women in advertisements regardless of

the product is related to sexuality. The use of sexual women images in advertisements is so

widespread that such images are found in the advertisements for most product types from

clothing, cosmetics, jewelries and furnitures.

For over twenty years, Jean Kilbourne has been writing, lecturing, and making films about

how advertising affects women and girls. In her essay, Kilbourne looks very deep into the

connection between abuse and ads.