7. A concluding invitation
Historically, marketing has viewed branding as beneficial to firms, consumers, and society-at- large because brands (1) tend to reduce consumer's search costs (because consumers are assured that a product with the same brand would perform similarly to products previously purchased), (2) make it possible to identify and hold accountable those firms that produce products of inferior quality (because each firm's products are no longer indistinguishable commodities), (3) provide an incentive for firms to produce higher quality goods (because such goods warrant higher prices), and (4) enable firms to earn higher profits (because the higher quality of branded goods warrants higher prices). Therefore, branding, customer-brand relationships, brand-equity strategies, and branding as a societal institution have been viewed by marketing as a “win-win-win” situation for firms, consumers, and society. In recent years, a worldwide, anti-branding movement has arisen that maintains that branding is ethically wrong. This article shows how the H–V theory and its “personal moral codes” framework can provide a starting point for understanding, evaluating, and investigating the ethics of branding. Specifically, the H–V theory points researchers toward exploring for different (1) deontological evaluations and (2) teleological evaluations, which implies searching for people's different (3) deontological norms and different (4) perceived consequences for (5) important versus unimportant stakeholders.
