ABSTRACT
At the same time of course, as a cornerstone of capitalism, marketing has also played a key role in precipitating the enormous rise in living standards and material wealth which have been a feature of many developed economies over the last two centuries. Moreover, as a source of brand identities, advertising and other promotional communications, marketing can be said to have been a chief producer of some of the twentieth century’s most powerful artefacts and icons of popular culture (see Barthes 1973). Now, with the advent of companies such as the Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s, who promote their corporate ethics and environmental responsibilities in order to enhance market share, the interconnections between marketing and morality have become ever more complex. The moral position of marketing is thus a difficult one to establish, and as a discipline and as a profession, marketing remains both venerated and vilified.
