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Ethical Issues of Social Marketing and Persuasion 179

questions. We use the term “corporate social marketing” when referring to
a social marketing initiative in which a company participates. Note that
companies often, but not always, promote causes in partnership with non-
profit organizations or public entities.

Identifying Ethical Issues
The first step in ethical decision-making is to identify the ethical issue.
Research has demonstrated that marketing, advertising, and public rela-
tions professionals often have difficulty recognizing ethical issues (Bowen,
2008; Drumwright & Murphy, 2004). They often suffer from moral
myopia, a distortion of moral vision that prevents ethical issues from com-
ing clearly into focus (Drumwright & Murphy, 2004). Drumwright and
Murphy (2004) found that moral myopia is often accompanied by moral
muteness, an unwillingness to talk about ethical issues (Bird & Waters,
1989; Bird, 2002). Reasonable people can disagree regarding what would
be an ethical response, but it is unlikely that effective ethical decision-
making will occur if the issue is not identified and discussed in some
depth.
This chapter identifies and elaborates on some potential ethical issues
in social marketing by adapting and augmenting a framework used by
Murphy and Bloom (1990) that applies the most frequent criticisms of
commercial marketing to social marketing. It then draws on work by
Andreasen and Drumwright (2001) to discuss some additional ethical is-
sues that are specific to corporate social marketing. The criticisms and
some key questions are presented in Table 7.1.

Ethical Issues in Social Marketing and Corporate Social Marketing

The ethical issues identified and discussed in the following section are not
intended to be an exhaustive list. Instead, the goal is to demonstrate how
social marketers can use well-known criticisms of marketing to raise po-
tential ethical questions in social marketing and develop ethical
sensitivity.
marketing is manipulative. Marketing has long been criticized for ma-
nipulating consumers and persuading them to buy things that they do not
need (e.g., expensive designer clothing, luxurious automobiles, lavish
homes) or products that have detrimental effects (e.g., cigarettes, alcohol,
guns, junk food; Murphy & Bloom, 1990). What if social marketing is
used to manipulate people and persuade them to engage in behavior that
is not ultimately good for them and/or society? For example, often there is