ABSTRACT
The most startling point from the above quote is not the quote itself, but rather its source – the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the professional body for marketers in the UK. In the twenty-first century, marketers themselves have recognized the importance of ethics to marketing practice. Consequently, the study of marketing ethics is important as society, business and marketers begin to further reflect on ethical issues of importance – be they global concerns over the warming of the earth and humans’ responsibility for the destruction of our natural environment or more micro, firmbased issues which focus on unethical business and marketing practices. Trust for both business and marketing activities is declining, particularly following large corporate scandals such as the Arthur Andersen, Enron and WorldCom affairs. As such, it seems imperative in the twenty-first century that a text such as The Marketing Book focuses on the subject of marketing ethics. Indeed, marketing ethics is not a new topic and has been debated, contested and explored in detail since the 1950s in academic texts and articles (see, for example, Adler et al., 1981; Tsalikis and Fritzsche,
1989; Jacobsen and Mazur 1995; Davidson, 2003; Murphy and Laczniak, 2006) as well as in more mainstream texts such as Vance Packard’s critique of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and critiques of consumer society (Fromm, 1955; Marcuse, 1964; Debord, 1977).
