The ethics of branding, customer-brand relationships, brand-equity strategy, and branding as a societal institution

The subject of branding, customer-brand relationships, brand equity strategies, and branding as a societal institution has become so controversial that an anti-branding movement has become widespread across several continents. This movement maintains that branding is not just problematic, but ethically wrong. This article uses the Hunt-Vitell theory of ethics to provide a framework for explicating people's personal moral codes, which in turn, helps us to understand the ethical controversy over branding. The article (1) provides a brief discussion of the nature of branding, (2) identifies major arguments that support the view that branding is morally wrong, (3) overviews the H–V theory of marketing ethics, (4) explicates the H–V theory's “personal moral codes” framework, and (5) shows how it provides a starting point for those who seek to understand, evaluate, and investigate the ethics of branding.