Awakening Awareness and Application: Utilizing Guest Speeches and Reflective Learning to Teach Ethics in Marketing

Abstract

There has been considerable debate on how to teach ethics within the marketing curriculum to accommodate the AACSB requirements requiring emphasis on ethical issues within the business curricula. Since introducing a separate course on marketing ethics has limited reach, we propose incorporating the ethical dimension through guest speeches and reflective learning in a mandatory Marketing course for all business majors. Through phenomenographic analysis of 121 student reflections, we report evidence supporting the effectiveness of this approach in significantly raising awareness of ethics in the marketing domain and in initiating the nurturing of ethical reasoning abilities in undergraduate business students early in their college careers. Students absorbed substantial amounts of knowledge at different levels and demonstrated significant cognitive processing within the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. Using this method to teach marketing ethics promotes awareness and application of ethical reasoning without compromising disciplinespecific instruction.