This essay highlights the importance of normative thinking in marketing ethics and proposes avenues for future research. It begins with contrasting positive and normative ethics. Then, a brief discussion of the literature in the field is included. Arguments offered by those who tend to avoid normative analysis are examined. Four types of normative ethical theories are presented: consequentialism, duty-based ethics, contract-based morality, and virtue ethics. The essay concludes with seven future research directions for normative marketing ethics and customer-brand relationships.

Introduction

Some of the world’s best known and historically respected brands have suffered serious ethical (and legal) lapses in just the past three years. Among the long list with their transgression in parentheses are: Apple (supply chain), Best Buy (data breach), Chipotle (tainted food), CVS (ad photo doctoring), Facebook (privacy and data protection), FIFA (bribery), Teva (price gouging), Uber (fares and corporate culture), United Airlines (customer abuse), Volkswagen (engine tampering), and Wells Fargo (consumer deception). This list could go on but the reason for beginning this essay with the designated issues is that these companies and others have not followed the accepted norms for business in dealing with their stakeholders. One problem common to all these cases appears to be a lack of strong moral grounding. In the paragraphs below, normative perspectives are offered for both scholars and practitioners who desire higher standards that will raise, rather than lower, consumer and societal expectations for brand marketers throughout the world. In this essay, we unapologetically advocate the importance of normative ethical viewpoints because the fundamental purpose of normative frameworks in moral philosophy is to espouse moral ideals. During this commentary, we also intentionally draw heavily on our own writings since we have been proponents of a greater focus on normative ethical marketing for nearly 45 years. Marketing ethics as a field of study is nested into a larger context that begins with applied ethics which encompasses engineering, law and medicine. Within applied ethics, the marketing domain is a subset of business ethics that deals with human resources, accounting, finance and analytics questions. We in marketing have long dealt with ethical issues in selling, advertising and product safety but in this century the other business disciplines, especially accounting and finance, have discovered that there are a host of ethical concerns facing them after the Enron/Arthur Andersen fiasco and the financial meltdown of a decade ago. The focus here, however, is exclusively on marketing ethics and the challenges faced by its practitioners and scholars. We begin with a definition of marketing ethics (ME): ME is defined as the systematic study of how moral standards are applied to marketing decisions, behaviors and institutions (Laczniak & Murphy, 1993). It draws on two distinct fields: (a) Philosophy which is normative and values focused, and, (b) Social Science, which is positive/descriptive and, often empirical. Both dimensions—normative philosophy and positive social science–are necessary to the understanding and improvement of ethical marketing practice—an end-goal presumably all academics and managers share. The normative/descriptive distinction goes back to classical Greek philosophy. Positive ethics describes what actually seems to occur in morally charged situations [often] based on observation or data. Normative ethics concerns justifying why a particular ethical standard might apply to a given practice and articulating the reasons for upholding such an ideal. Normative ethics (like the methods of positivism), when applied to marketing issues, is part of a scripted analytical process. It is not about pithy aphorisms such as “the customer is always right” or “good corporate citizens obey the law.” Such simplifications are illustrative of 1950s era business/marketing ethics and the caricatures perpetrated by misguided critics of ethical relevance (Gaski, 1999; Smith, 2001).