Rita Lauria
USA
Anne-Cécile Jeandrain
Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Visiting Scholar, Media Interface & Network Design Labs
USA
A marketing “scenario” is used as a way to contemplate and discuss the issues related to ethics and telepresence. More and more, facilitating the consumer’s experience of telepresence becomes the goal in e-marketing. Nonetheless, there exists an evident lack of empirical results about the exact impact of telepresence on the user and more specifically on consumer behavior. Effectively, the crucial question is: “Is telepresence experience necessarily a good thing – for the consumer?” This question remains unanswered. Our paper pursues the goal of philosophical ethics, i.e., to identify clear thinking and the implications of clear thinking for behavior especially as it relates to the virtualization of marketing and telepresence. While this paper proposes to explore our current marketing environment - one that shifts from physicality to virtuality – for potential fundamental ethical content, the primary objective is to extend this view to fundamental ethical considerations that surround telepresence.