An integrated model for ethical decisions in marketing research

While many models of ethical decision-making in marketing have been presented in the literature, no recent attempts have been made to explicitly account for ethical decision-making from a marketing research perspective. We present an ethical framework for marketing research, the various philosophies of ethics, and a few enduring marketing ethical decision-making models, thus laying the foundation for a descriptive model for ethics in marketing research. The authors then develop an integrated model of ethical decision-making that incorporates the perspectives of all parties involved in the process of making ethical marketing research decisions, the various philosophies, and external variables. The proposed model is compared with some of the models considered in the literature and illustrated with a marketing research application.