I used to work for a family-owned franchise of a major cleaning and restoration company that did a lot of marketing. Besides the usual insurance industry-based marketing, they did a lot of outreach to fire and police departments. My boss liked to cook, so she came up with the idea to give out Crock Pots full of chili to the fire departments. My boss gave me some bullet point notes and asked me to draft a letter to go along with the Crock Pot. The major theme she wanted me to really hammer home was "for every clean-up job that you refer to us, we’ll give you a new recipe for your Crock Pot". I raised concern to her that maybe this wasn’t a good business practice, and sounded "shady" to me. She shot me a dirty look and told me to do it, because she wanted to be clear to the fire departments that they wouldn’t get new recipes for unless they referred jobs to us.

I went against my boss’ orders and changed the wording to make it sound less "quid pro quo", It went unnoticed as she never bothered to read the letter.

Is what she wanted me to do legal?
Thanks Teekno. Maybe I should say "ethical" and not "illegal". Is it an ethical business practice?

Um, the only thing that might make it illegal was the fact that the offer was made to police and fire departments. But, since what you were offering was a recipe, something of practically no intrinsic value, it’s probably not illegal.