Ethical Marketing: Definition, Principles, & Examples

Ethical marketing is when you promote a product, service, or brand in a way that aligns with your values and morals.

In this guide, we’ll explore the principles it encompasses and how you can incorporate them into your business.

This depends on your principles and what you define as ethical—but to get more concrete answers, we spoke with some marketers and ran polls on Ahrefs’ and my personal Twitter accounts.

Here are five common themes that made ourlist:

Honesty and transparency

Being honest and transparent means not making misleading, inflated, or untrue claims across the whole process: production and delivery of goods and/or services, employment practices, the value proposition of your product, andmore.

As marketing consultant Maria Soleil putsit:

The principles of ethical marketing include being responsible, honest and transparent in promotional activities, prioritizing data privacy, not engaging in pressure tactics, avoiding using UX dark patterns, using inclusive language, andmore.

It’s also about using suppliers, partners, and platforms that align with your morals and values. For example, I no longer use Meta to promote my business, and am exploring how to help my clients be less reliant on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Here’s another definition that resonated withus:

Fairness and respect

This is again subjective. At Ahrefs, our idea of respect involves *not* running ads on our competitors’ names,...