How do you market your product for a company?

Does a company have any obligation to not produce and sell an ineffective product, even if there is a strong market demand for that type of product?

• This is about my former employer, a leading educational publishing house within South Korea. They make a lot of money selling books that basically don't teach the material they are supposed to. There are a variety of reasons their products are ineffective - including both the low quality of the material and the entire pedagogical model they are based on. Basically, the company outsells competitors because they have a lot of brand prestige and great marketing. There are external factors involved in how the company's products are used which they cannot control. The local schools, which use these books, are a huge part of the problem: their teaching models basically don't work. And local parents are often too obsessed with pushing educational achievement on their young children. Many parents and schools force kids to spend hours and hours studying and doing homework every day, with little to no free time, often starting in early primary school. (Source: Time: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html). Those things were not being caused directly by my old company, but we did profit from them. In the end, even though that was my best-paying job ever, I lost my motivation and quit. Though venerated in the local market, our books were often of such poor quality that I was honestly ashamed to have my name printed in them. Also, I felt like we were just making money cranking out junk that was forced on kids, that wasted their time, and didn't teach them much. I felt like the kids were victims of both our profit margin and their broken school system. The students using these materials are already under an unhealthy amount of pressure to succeed academically and forced to spend most of their time studying. South Korean students are actually the most clinically depressed in the developed world, and the education system is largely why. (Source: The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/05/depressed_students_south_korea) The fact that they are not even getting effective material, or being taught to study effectively, makes that huge sacrifice seem like a tragic waste. If I were them I would feel angry that I was forced to basically give up most of my childhood memorizing often-useless textbooks. I know that corporations have a legal responsibility to make money for their shareholders; that's why corporations exist. We all need jobs, and we need to work for profitable companies so we can have them. However, where does that responsibility end? What is the role of an ethical corporation operating in a market that has such dire social impact? Am I naive about basic market economics for feeling uncomfortable about working for such an employer in such a context?

• Answer:

  Corporations may legally be people, but people without souls. As a real person I feel a responsibility to do my best to add value in my work. If the work I am given to do is doomed to be crap then I have other things I can do.