Abstract
Existing debates on business ethics under-represent consumers’ perspectives. In order to progress understanding of ethical judgement in the marketplace, we unpack the interconnections between consumer ethical judgment, consent and context. We address the question of how consumers judge the morality of threat-based experiential marketing communications. Our interpretive qualitative research shows that consumers can feel positively about being shocked, judging threat appeals as more or less ethical by the nature of the negative emotions they experience. We also determine that the intersection between ethical judgement, consent and context lies where consumers’ perceptions of fairness and consequences lend contextualised normative approval to marketing practice. Our research makes three original contributions to existing literature. First, it extends theory in the area of ethical judgement, by highlighting the importance of consent for eliciting positive moral responses. Second, it adds to embryonic research addressing the role of emotions in ethical judgement, by ascertaining that negative emotions can elicit positive consumer ethical judgement. Third, our research contributes an original concept to ethical judgement theorisation, namely consumer-experienced positive shock (CEPS). We define CEPS as a consensual shock value judged as ethical due to its ephemerality, commercial resonance, brand alignment, target-audience appropriateness and contextual acceptability. We also extrapolate the dimensions of CEPS into an ethical judgement typology, elucidating how consumers judge some threat-based communications as ethical, but not others. Consequently, our work dovetails with wider business ethics debates on ethical judgement, adding value by clarifying the conditions that generate positive consumer ethical judgement.
Highlights
Existing debates on marketing ethics, and business ethics more broadly, under-represent consumers’ perspectives (Shabbir et al 2018)
This section outlines the key themes emerging from the data, leading to the development of the concept of consumer-experienced positive shock (CEPS) and a typology extrapolating its consent and ethical judgement dimensions
Multidimensional interconnections between ethical judgment and consent, we determine that consumer perceptions of consequences and fairness in consent transactions lend contextualised normative approval to experiential marketing practice
Summary
Existing debates on marketing ethics, and business ethics more broadly, under-represent consumers’ perspectives (Shabbir et al 2018). Existing literature tends to examine ethical judgement in organisational contexts (Trevino 1992; Jones 1991, 2009; Lindebaum et al 2017), or the link between ethical judgement and consumers’ own ethical or unethical behaviours (Hunt and Vitell 1986; Vitell and Muncy 1992, 2005; Vitell et al 2016). Our work dovetails with wider business ethics debates on ethical judgement (McMahon and Harvey 2006; Nguyen and Biderman 2008; Trevino 1992), clarifying the criteria and conditions that can generate positive consumer ethical judgement
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