Thai Consumer Perspective on Marketing Ethics of Consumer Products

Abstract

Consumer complaints are continuously growing in Thailand; although consumer protection laws protect the Thai people while the current situation differs. Therefore, this research investigated the marketing ethics of consumer products from the perspective of Thai consumers and suggested the development of marketing ethics strategies for Thai businesses. This quantitative research used a questionnaire to collect data from 400 Thai consumers, which focused on personal factors, consumer buying behavior, problem & solution requirement, and satisfaction towards the marketing ethics of consumer products. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation, and inference statistics to test the research hypotheses. The research results showed that the buying problems were high prices, deceptive advertising, selling prices over the price tag, defective/expired products, and below specification. Meanwhile, consumers required product replacement or money refunds as their preferred solution choices from producers at most. The hypotheses testing found that differences in personal factors (age and marital status) resulted in different preferences on marketing ethics of consumer products satisfaction, but the gender factor showed no differences. Meanwhile, consumer behavior factors (product type buying and buying frequency) and problem-solution requirement factor (no-any-action) resulted in different preferences on marketing ethics of consumer products satisfaction at a statistically significant difference of 0.05.