Unethical Pricing Practices and Direct Marketing Strategies – United Airlines
Marketing ethics includes consumer protection, pricing, and advertising. Using your favorite web browser, research a company that practices direct marketing. For this assignment, you will write an article review that address the following points and questions:
Briefly describe the company and the types of products it markets.
Explain direct (or targeted) marketing and how this company uses the strategy for advertising their products.
Explain two types of unethical pricing practices and support with examples. Is the company you researched guilty of unethical pricing? Offer an example of this company’s pricing to validate your assessment.
Determine how the article contributes to knowledge regarding targeted marketing ethics. How does it inform or illustrate concepts you have learned in this unit?
Your article review must be at least three pages, but no more than four double-spaced pages, not counting the title and reference pages. You are required to use at least three outside sources to support your review. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations, introduction, and references for all sources that are used. Please note that no abstract is needed.
Unethical Pricing Practices and Direct Marketing Strategies – The Case of United Airlines
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Introduction
Founded in 1926, United Airlines (UA) completed its journey to become a flagship brand of the American airline industry through effective marketing and relationship building. The company offers flight services on five continents. The servicescape includes air tickets, flight booking, travel plans, and inflight catering (UA, 2023). Direct marketing in the airline industry has become a core practice since the COVID-19 outbreak. Most airline brands experienced a pandemic shock on profitability and opted for a direct marketing strategy to re-stabilize revenue streams. Direct marketing involves direct interactions with customers. Brands use social media platforms to communicate with customers directly and build relationships (Sheth, 2021).
On the contrary, the airline industry also exhibited unethical pricing in its marketing strategies. Price fixing is an early arrangement between competitors to charge high prices unnecessarily and leverage a tentative market crisis. Brands like UA use unethical pricing practices to control market trends and take irrational advantage of a situation (Akbari, 2023). This paper will discuss UA’s direct marketing strategy and unethical pricing to exploit customers during a debacle.