A recent USA Today article reports medical offices, churches, and schools moving into shopping mall spaces. These less-traditional tenants are still retailers, in that they’re offering products or services to end consumers and therefore must show the consumer a return on investment.
The way a small to midsize retail store does business is influenced by how the surrounding retailers are doing business. The unitary identity and physical proximity of retailers in a shopping mall strengthens this influence. When your neighbor is a medical office, church, or school, the ways in which your shoppers define business ethics may change.
Researchers at University of Colorado-Boulder, Tulane University, and University of Pennsylvania distinguish between market-based and communal ethical standards. Imagine the situation where a church announced they’d be outsourcing backlogged prayer requests to priests in India in order to save on operating expenses. Based on results from their studies, the researchers say consumers of the services offered by the church would be disturbed by the prayer outsourcing. Yet consumers would generally accept a dress shop announcing that, in order to keep selling prices lower, the shop sells clothes produced in India.
Or consider the retailer selling pharmaceuticals who announces special programs to allow those without adequate funds to get the drugs at a reduced fee. Most consumers would consider this to be ethical, although not surprising. On the other hand, if the dress shop said they’d charge less to the economically disadvantaged, consumers would consider this surprising. If the consumers thought other customers were being charged more as a result of this policy, they might even consider the discount pricing to be unethical.
People expect communal ethics from churches and medical offices, while accepting market-driven ethics from commercial businesses. They also are likely to expect a higher degree of communal ethics from a commercial business operating next to a church or medical office. Within a store, shoppers are more likely to be outraged by suspiciously high prices on educational supplies than on cosmetics. And beyond this, they are more likely to be disturbed by luxury-priced products immediately adjacent to the educational supplies than by those same products neighboring merchandise without a public service association.
And what if you are the church in the mall? The researchers found that consumers were less upset with outsourced prayers when the church pointed out how everyone is part of God’s community. An explanation using communal ethics.
Click below for more:
Anticipate Ethics Slippage
Disclose Product Cautions
Earn Permission to Misbehave
Have Fun Items Throughout the Store
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