Marketing Ethics

What is Marketing Ethics?

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Marketing ethics are the norms and values that guide how we make decisions in this work. Ethical marketing means more than just staying within legal lines—it’s about building trust, fostering transparency, and acting with integrity. In practice, that means:

• Following applicable laws and regulations (the minimum standard)
• Acting with integrity beyond legal requirements, ensuring that actions align with words and values
• Avoiding and mitigating harm
• Making decisions that demonstrate responsibility to customers, stakeholders, and society 

Marketers regularly navigate ethical grey areas where they need to determine what is right and wrong given their particular industry, market, brand, and customer base, and there is no single rulebook that could realistically cover all new and niche situations. 

What’s appropriate varies across industries, geographies, and time. The following are just a few examples: 

• Many niche trade associations, such as the Direct Selling Association, have their own guidelines. 
• Industries such as healthcare are subject to laws and regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States. 
• Data protection and privacy is a fundamental right in Europe with strict legal protections, while other countries like the United States balance data privacy with business interests. 
• Actions that were once considered going “above and beyond” like hiring a diverse workforce or having a carbon-neutral footprint can shift over time and within specific consumer segments, becoming standard and expected behavior.
• With the rise of new technologies and changes in consumer expectations, marketers will always be presented with fresh ethical challenges to sort out, as they needed to do with the rise of social media, big data, or generative AI.

Without a universal rule book, values serve as an ethical compass—but navigating by values is rarely simple. Ethical decision-making is inherently complex because values are deeply personal, shaped by individual experience, cultural context, and organizational mission.  What feels like the right course of action in one setting may not hold in another, and it is a challenge to get all stakeholders, including employees, aligned around a set of shared values. There’s power in acknowledging that this work is hard, and that’s exactly why it matters. 

The AMA’s Statement of Ethics identifies five values implied by our responsibility to society: honesty, responsibility, equity, transparency, and citizenship. These aren’t intended as a rigid checklist or a moral high ground. Instead, they provide a shared baseline—a starting point for making ethical decisions in a world full of nuance. Companies may layer in additional values that reflect their brand promise, audience expectations, or industry realities. 

And when marketers lead with integrity, the business case is clear: customers who trust a brand buy more, stay longer, and advocate louder. Ethical marketing isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing. It builds loyalty, credibility, and long-term value for marketers, brands, consumers, and society.

The Case for Marketing Ethics: Restoring Trust in Brands and The Profession

Marketers face a growing crisis of trust that threatens both the profession and the brands they represent. As marketers, we face a unique opportunity to respond to this crisis with strategic action and leadership.

For consumers, trust ranks alongside value and quality as a top purchase consideration, making it a business imperative, not a bonus. Yet according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in institutions is in decline, with 68% of people believing leaders deliberately mislead the public. 

Inside organizations, this credibility gap is even more tangible. CMOs have one of the shortest tenures of any c-suite role, and less than one in five CEOs are confident their CMO can drive company growth. According to a study by Gartner, fewer than one in four CEOs and CFOs say their CMO has been clear about what the marketing department is responsible for. This isn’t just a communications issue, it’s a missed opportunity. When marketing is seen as unclear or unreliable, we lose influence, budget, and voice at the leadership table.

And that’s where ethics comes in—not as a checklist, but as a compass. Ethical marketing builds trust. Trust allows marketers to reclaim our influence, earn buy-in from stakeholders, and prove the long-term value of what we do. Ethical marketing strengthens brand loyalty, enhances internal alignment, and enables marketing leaders to drive not just awareness, but meaningful business and cultural change.

Ethical marketing builds trust. Trust allows marketers to reclaim our influence, earn buy-in from stakeholders, and prove the long-term value of what we do.

Marketing is the most customer-facing function in the business. Done right, it aligns company vision with human needs, shaping not just brand perception but business outcomes and societal impact. “Whether we like it or not, marketing shapes the world we live in,” declared Robin Scheines in her 2025 call to action for marketers to harness attention for good. From bus stop signs to social feeds, our work helps shape not just what people buy—but what they believe.

Now is the time for marketers to lead, together. By taking a stand and advocating for ethical practices, we can demonstrate that principled marketing is also powerful marketing. When trust is restored, everyone benefits: consumers, companies, and the profession itself.

What Marketers Need to Do And Know

For All Marketers:

• Understand both the risks of losing trust and benefits of earning it
• Monitor how consumers’ expectations and values are changing
• Identify ethical risks in marketing, and cultivate a deep understanding of laws, regulations, and considerations unique to their industries and markets
• Use shared values as decision-making tools
• Effectively communicate about ethical risks to stakeholders both in and outside marketing

For Marketing Leaders:

• Create a culture of trust within your team
• Set clear ethical expectations, with accountability measures
• Model ethical conduct personally
• Collaborate with legal, HR, and IT teams to create policies and practices that uphold ethical standards
• Position trust as a competitive advantage
• Develop and advocate for ethics-centered brand strategies
• Practice ethical foresight, anticipating emerging issues 

Marketing leaders have an additional responsibility of creating a culture of trust amongst their team. According to the 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey, the vast majority of employees (87%) say that their workplace does not have a strong ethical culture. People tend to look at what their supervisor is encouraging and what their coworkers are doing to know what is appropriate, meaning that they can be involved in unethical activities without knowing it. Marketing leaders must provide the vision, foresight, and guidance that their teams need to stay on track. 

“The placard in the boardroom says Chief Marketing Officer, but the T-shirt needs to say Chief Trust Officer,” notes Bennie F. Johnson, CEO of the American Marketing Association. “Trust breaks down when there is a disconnect between expectations, experience, and power. Marketing leaders gain a superpower when they help brands navigate these challenges and build alignment between internal values and how the company engages and communicates with the outside world.”

“The placard in the boardroom says Chief Marketing Officer, but the T-shirt needs to say Chief Trust Officer.”

– Bennie F. Johnson, CEO of the American Marketing Association

Advocating for ethical actions is not the responsibility of marketing alone. Marketing leaders must collaborate with legal, HR, and IT teams to design, implement, and maintain policies and practices that uphold ethical standards. Often, marketing teams are the recipients of decisions made by legal or ethics officers—but they must be proactive in leveraging shared values with customers in a way that provides a competitive advantage, and in identifying potential ethical red flags that could harm the brands’ reputation.

Resources for Ethical Marketing

AMA Privacy Task Force

If you’re interested in getting involved in the future of privacy, consider joining AMA’s Privacy Task Force, a volunteer-led group that meets virtually on a regular basis. To learn more or get involved, contact privacytaskforce@ama.org. 

General Marketing Ethics Resources

• Association of National Advertisers’ Ethics Code of Marketing Best Practices outlines 15 general ethical principles and provides guidelines, examples, and resources in seven areas, such as marketing to specific audiences. 
• David Hagenbuch’s “Mindful Matrix” is a tool to encourage discussion of ethical issues in marketing, asking if the action upholds universal values (is it ethical) and if it creates shareholder value (is it effective). 
• Ken Blanchard’s trust model is helpful for thinking through how to build trust and credibility. 

Truth in Advertising

• Deceptive Patterns is a website dedicated to providing facts about deceptive patterns, the “tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.” The website identifies different types of deceptive patterns, describes what laws govern their use, and tracks legal cases. 
• The United States’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provides resources to help businesses navigate consumer protection regulations in the country. 
• The Better Business Bureau (BBB) fosters a culture of honesty and fairness in business transactions in part through accrediting businesses in the United States and Canada based on their Standards for Trust. The BBB Code of Advertising provides more detailed guidelines for advertisers, advertising agencies and advertising media. 
• National Advertising Division (NAD) is a system of independent industry self-regulation that builds consumer trust in advertising and supports fair competition in the marketplace. NAD’s case decisions represent the single largest body interpreting advertising law in the country. 

Data Privacy, Compliance, and Security

• International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) is a global information privacy community and resource. They organize conferences like the Global Privacy Summit, provide various certifications in the field of privacy, and provide useful resources, such as the US State Privacy Legislation Tracker. 
• ISACA publishes an annual State of Privacy Report on the latest responsibilities and challenges privacy teams are facing. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility

• The AMA has a collection of resources on DEIA for marketers, including short videos and on-demand training. 
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standards for web accessibility. 

Social and Environmental Responsibility

• The AMA has multiple special journal issues that touch on social and environmental responsibility, including Better Marketing for a Better World (Journal of Marketing, 2021), Marketing to End War, Create Peace, and Enhance Sustainable Well-Being (Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 2024), and Mitigation in Marketing (Journal of Marketing Research, 2024). 
• The Sustainable Marketing Compass provides a framework for embedding sustainability into marketing, aligning with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 
• What is Sustainable Marketing?, an article from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, defines sustainable marketing and identifies areas of impact and opportunity. 

Responsible Use of AI

• MIT’s AI Risk Repository offers a living database of over 1000 AI risks categorized by their cause and risk domain. 
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a set of resources for managing AI risks, including a general AI risk management framework and a framework specifically for generative AI. 
• The International Organization for Standardization’s ISO/IEC 42001 is an international standard that specifies requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS) within organizations. 
• OWASP’s Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications is a community-driven effort to highlight and address security issues specific to AI applications. 

Thanks

The AMA sought input from a group of industry experts to shape our definition of ethics and recommended resources. We thank these contributors for their time, thought leadership, and dedication to advancing ethical marketing practice. 

Melinda Byerley, Founder and CEO, Fiddlehead® Marketing

Courtney Fenstermaker, Head of Industry, Consumer Brands, InfoTrust

Linda Ferrell, Globe Life Professor of Marketing at Auburn University

O.C. Ferrell, Director of Center for Ethical Organizational Cultures at Auburn University

David Hagenbuch, Professor of Marketing, Messiah University. 

Young Mi Park, Lecturer, Columbia University

Aurélie Pols, Business Privacy Specialist (BPS) & Business Data Owner (BDO), Hospitality  Media, Amadeus

Mark Redfern, Website Marketing Manager, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Siobhan Solberg, Founder & Data Protection Consultant, Raze

Cory Underwood, Lead Senior Analytics Engineer, Further