ABSTRACT
Consideration of the moral dimension of marketing has increased significantly in recent years. Areas of literature such as marketing ethics and green marketing have experienced rapid development since their emergence (or re-emergence) in the 1980s; new forms of behaviour such as ethical consumerism and ethical branding have opened up entirely new areas of literature; and various concepts and theories such as macromarketing, social marketing and the societal marketing concept have become firmly established constituents of marketing thought. It would be wrong, however, to assume that these new areas of interest represent the beginning of the marketing discipline’s consideration of morality. There is evidence of moral issues entering marketing thought for as long as marketing has existed as a distinct field in itself, and since then there have been a number of waves of interest in morality. Marketing is therefore an extraordinarily rich field in which to study morality. In this chapter, I examine the various strands of the literature. The main aims are to illustrate the diversity of this literature, its contribution to our understanding of marketing and morality, and also some of its shortcomings in this respect. My ultimate intention though is to be in position to make a case for the study of moral meaning in marketing in Chapter 3; it is after all on this that my claims for the contribution of this book principally rest.
