Moral Guidelines for Marketing Good Corporate Conduct Online

Most companies now include corporate social responsibility as a part of their stated goals in business practice. Whether as simple as a corporate code of conduct or as complicated as including social responsibility in a company’s fundamental structure, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is now par for the course. This is in part due to Sarbanese-Oxley and changes in the federal sentencing guidelines (Stoll, 2008). This heightened concern with CSR has also grown because consumers and investors have become more willing to hold transnational corporations morally accountable for their actions. The rise of nongovernmental watchdog organizations that have gone global along with the companies they track has further helped to make social accountability crucial to business practice. However, making consumers aware of moral guidelines at work in the creation and distribution of goods and services is importantly different from standard corporate attempts to sell products. Traditional advertising and public relations practices that may serve well abStRaCt