The incorporation of ethics in the capitalist system and as an important tool for brand building and differentiation has shown to be a complex and tricky matter. Although Sen (1993) argues that a self-interest and profit maximization as a motivation for exchange can co-exist with ethical behavior and the public good, it seems that this co-existence depends on the profit potential of ethics. Both firms and consumers are willing to act ethical as long as it can be aligned with a capitalist logic of making profit or reducing costs. When being forced to prioritize between the two, ethics seems to be considered less important. However building a brand image with clear ethical associations may still serve organizations well. It may function as both a tool for brand positioning and competitive advantage simultaneously as it may deflect the public’s attention away from parallel but doubtful company practices. Concurrently, consumers buying ethical brands may experience the well-being of contributing to a better society and environment, where consuming ethical brands becomes a way by which they construct an individual identity as ethically aware and responsible persons. In contemporary society ethics is therefore increasingly exercised via peoples’ sometimes fickle and contradictory consumption choices rather than through a consistent political or public policy engagement. Discursively
constructing a market of ethics and the consumer as ethically responsible then offers brands novel opportunities for differentiation, at the same time as it supplies consumers with additional and plausible identity positions.
Interestingly ethics and corporate social responsibility are often used actively by brands to communicate a distinctive position and to attain a competitive edge over their rivals by being different. Being ethical is thus something that is to add value, both for the firm and for its customers, beyond what is expected. A different, and perhaps enlightening, approach on ethics would be to regard it as a hygiene factor (as opposed to a tool for differentiation), where acting ethically and responsibly is something that people would take for granted and expect from brands. From such a perspective ethics or acting ethical becomes a matter more of duty than of free choice.
The ethics of duty, which emanates from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), has been one of the most influential theories within business ethics. His theory consists of a set of eternal, unchangeable and abstract principles or maxims that may be employed to test the ethicalness of every possible action (Crane and Matten, 2010). Consequently these principles may fruitfully be used to scrutinize or test the ethicalness of brands’ actions. Kant’s Maxim 2: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’, seem to constitute a particularly fitting criteria in this instance. In light of Kant’s maxim, employing ethics as a means to an end, thus as means to position your brand and gain profit, would according to his ethics of duty, fail the test. The twist almost becomes ironical. Firms’ engagement in ethical actions for the sake of their brand instead of for the sake of ethics (per se) makes those actions non-ethical.
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the author
Jon Bertilsson, PhD, works as a lecturer in marketing at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University. He is a consumer researcher who currently investigates consumers’ morality, and the way in which consumers sophisticate themselves through mundane consumption.
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) www.ephemerajournal.org volume 14(1): 137-142