International Marketing Review 12,4 50 Moral conflicts among Norwegian advertising professionals A summary of pilot data Johannes Brinkmann Associate Professor, School of Marketing, NMH, Oslo, Norway Background As in many other countries, the Norwegian advertising industry has adopted the ICC-code (1987, see Appendix 1). What Norwegian advertising professionals should do (or leave) is also regulated by the Norwegian Marketing Control Act, and by legislation dealing with fair competition. There are specific actors and norm-senders more or less related to each of such rule-sets: such as the industry’s own ethics council which can handle ethical “cases” if parties should ask for it, or the consumer-ombudsman and the Market Council. Business and industry ethics have also been dealt with occasionally in Norwegian mass media and in Byrånytt, the industry medium. For most of the respondents, a study dealing with codes and conflicts was probably not raising essentially new questions, but rather inviting them to articulate opinions. Research questions The starting point of the study was practical and exploratory. The issue was to map a need for an industry code of ethics in a “be aware poster” format. By letting respondents vote on both the frequency and seriousness of 16 selected moral conflicts at work, as well as the idea of a code as such, one could formulate suggestions for how such a code could be designed (Lunde, 1993). At the same time, as instruments built on previous research, a somewhat more academic use of the data, at least as pilot data, was possible. Formulating this more systematically, three rather practical questions serve as a point of departure: (1) W hich moral conflicts are perceived as most frequent among Norwegian advertising professionals, and which of these conflicts are most serious? (2) How would advertising professionals probably behave in such situations? The author would like to thank his colleagues Thorolf Helgesen and Ingar Holme, both based at NSM, Oslo, and Pat Murphy, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, for useful comments to different versions of this article. A ny remaining imperfections are the author’s own responsibility. International Marketing Review, Vol. 12 No. 4, 1995, pp. 50-64. © MCB University Press, 0265-1335