Page 185 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Ethical Issues of Social Marketing and Persuasion 177

to determine the rules that ought to govern human conduct, the values
worth pursuing, and the character traits deserving development in life”
(DeGeorge, 2006, pp. 19–20). The study of marketing ethics is the “sys-
tematic study of how moral standards are applied to marketing decisions,
behaviors, and institutions” (Laczniak & Murphy, 1993). Ethical market-
ing has been defined as “practices that emphasize transparent, trustworthy,
and responsible personal and/or organizational marketing policies and ac-
tions that exhibit integrity as well as fairness to consumers and other
stakeholders” (Murphy, Laczniak, & Prothero, 2012, p. 4). Ethical social
marketing should certainly meet the standards of ethical marketing.
Ethics is “concerned with questions of what ought to be done, not just
what legally must be done” (Cunningham, 1999, p. 500). Too often the
two are blended, and the latter comes to define the former. The relation-
ship between law and ethics should be clarified. Laws are ultimately a re-
flection of ethical judgments, and societies often make illegal what they
consider most unethical. A fundamental mistake, however, is to assume
that because something is legal, it is ethical, or that if something is unethi-
cal, it will be made illegal (Drumwright, 1993). Ethics often require judg-
ments about issues that have not been addressed in law. Marketing law is
a subset of marketing ethics. It does not and cannot encompass all of mar-
keting ethics. Preston (1994, p. 128) observed that for marketers who
believe the law is sufficient, “ethics never really starts.”
Increasingly, social marketing messages are seen as political speech,
which is a matter of law. When they qualify as political speech they war-
rant First Amendment protection, and as such they cannot be made illegal
or be too closely regulated. The traditional exception to the First
Amendment that allows robust governmental regulation of commercial
speech (e.g., laws requiring messages to be nondeceptive) does not apply.
This exemption places an even greater burden on the social marketer to
identify ethical issues, analyze them in a sophisticated and nuanced man-
ner, and respond to them responsibly and ethically. It is our position that
social marketers should not walk close to the “unethical line.”

Types of Social Marketing

Before we address ethical issues, we must acknowledge that social market-
ing encompasses a broad and diverse set of causes, and some undoubtedly
are more likely to raise ethical issues than others. In an early article on
ethics in social marketing, Murphy, Laczniak, and Lusch (1978) adapted a
framework by Kotler (1973) to highlight three different types of social
marketing that encompass causes with varying potential for raising ethical