The ethics of branding, customer-brand relationships, brand-equity strategy, and branding as a societal institution

摘要

The subject of branding, customer-brand relationships, brand equity strategies, and branding as a societal institution has become so controversial that an anti-branding movement has become widespread across several continents. This movement maintains that branding is not just problematic, but ethically wrong. This article uses the Hunt-Vitell theory of ethics to provide a framework for explicating people's personal moral codes, which in turn, helps us to understand the ethical controversy over branding. The article (1) provides a brief discussion of the nature of branding, (2) identifies major arguments that support the view that branding is morally wrong, (3) overviews the H-V theory of marketing ethics, (4) explicates the H-V theory's "personal moral codes" framework, and (5) shows how it provides a starting point for those who seek to understand, evaluate, and investigate the ethics of branding.