Ethical marketing in entrepreneurship

📅 Published: August 17, 2025

📰 Source: thestandard

Curated by AllZimNews.com

Companies that adhere to marketing ethics often aim to respect their consumers’ rights, wants, and expectations.

While business leaders seek to generate profit and operational income, they may also prioritise principles such as honesty, ethics, and fairness over making money.

Positive marketing ethics:When you adhere to positive marketing ethics, you conduct actions that benefit people, society, and the environment.

This approach goes beyond merely complying with the law and aims to make a positive impact on many lives.

Such moral actions promote honesty, fairness, social responsibility, and empathy.

They consider how products will benefit individuals, as well as how they will fulfil social responsibilities and address various moral issues.

Normative marketing ethics:Normative marketing ethics involves examining and applying moral principles and rules that guide what should be done in marketing.

It involves setting moral standards and emphasising the best behaviours and practices that marketers and businesses should adopt.

Normative ethics provides businesses with a framework to make ethical marketing decisions that align with widely accepted moral norms.

There are numerous issues that arise when entrepreneurs attempt to uphold the highest ethical standards in marketing, which the entire ecosystem has to grapple with as noted below.

False advertising:This occurs when the benefits of a product or service are overstated in marketing and advertising messages.

False advertising can cause people to trust a brand less and damage its reputation in the long term.