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Walker Columbia Southern University ABA 4751 – Business Ethics Proof. M. Frisker Introduction Marketing in schools should be regulated because this is a place of education with impressionable young minds; these establishments are there to teach young people about social interaction, healthy eating, and the pros and cons of materialism. Because of government budget cuts in school systems today, marketers see this situation as an opportunity to monopolize the younger school-aged consumers.
Relevant Facts Today, because of government budget cuts schools can participate in incentive programs such as box top collections, corporate induced free educational materials for product promotion such as getting a free meal from a fast food restaurant for attendance. The worst form of marketing is the organizations that use exclusive agreements with the schools by offering the schools a percentage of their profits to obtain a monopoly for their products.
Marketing to children is now a billion dollar refit for corporations that want to corner the young consumers into buying their products by advertising through media, school events, and transportation. “Commercials in schools occur in many forms. Products are directly advertised in a variety of formats and circumstances, including on school buses and through Channel One, a for- profit media company that produces news programming shown daily in thousands of middle and high school classrooms” (Hartman, Discarding, & MacDonald, 2014).
Some marketing can be positive such as advertisement by the litany to influence young people to set goals on their futures. Materialism can be advertised by selling products with stickers, for instance the company that sales Vans shoes, in the shoe box are stickers and children place these on book bags and this form of advertising can be seen by other students making them want the product. Finally, marketing in schools is a very controversial issue and schools should place them above profit.