Social fairness and social marketing: An integrative justice approach to creating an ethical framework for social marketers
ISSN: 2042-6763
Article publication date: 18 October 2019
Issue publication date: 18 October 2019
Abstract
Purpose
Social marketers set out to undertake interventions that benefit society. However, at times, there can be inadvertent, unintended consequences of these interventions that can be seen as unethical. Such ethical issues can arise from the context, process, method and outcomes of interventions and often bring to the fore the “social fairness” of social marketing. Given that social marketing is aimed at societal benefit, the authors believe that the issue of social fairness is an important one in the context of ethical social marketing. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the application of a normative ethical framework, labelled the integrative justice model (IJM) (Santos and Laczniak, 2009), to social marketing. This amounts to a macro-social marketing ethical framework.
Design/methodology/approach
Conceptual broadening of a normative ethical framework.
Findings
The authors hold that the IJM provides several helpful normative guidelines for improving the “social fairness” of social marketing. As such, the presented normative framework of macro-social marketing ethics provides useful guidelines for future development of social marketing codes of ethics.
Practical implications
The macro-social marketing ethics framework provides practical guidelines for social marketers to assess ethical issues in social marketing.
Originality/value
The macro-social marketing ethics framework answers the call of Carter, Mayes, Eagle and Dahl (2017) for development of ethical frameworks for social marketers. It provides a reconciliation of multiple normative frameworks to give a set of guidelines for social marketers that are clear and non-contradictory.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper forms part of a special section “Social good and ethics in social marketing for wicked problems”, guest edited by Krzysztof Kubacki, Natalia Szablewska and Ann-Marie Kennedy.
Citation
Kennedy, A.-M. and Santos, N. (2019), "Social fairness and social marketing: An integrative justice approach to creating an ethical framework for social marketers", Journal of Social Marketing, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 522-539. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-10-2018-0120
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited