Market research ethics: New practices but no new ideas

The ethical issues involved with marketing research are receiving increased public scrutiny, prompting calls for marketing scholars and research practitioners to revisit the issue. To support researchers and practitioners, this paper provides a systematic scoping review of research on the ethics of market research developed across a range of literatures (N = 134). It demonstrates that, over 70 years, marketing scholars have explored the ethics of market research from normative, descriptive, theoretical and technical approaches. But, while marketing scholars were once at the forefront of theorising the ethics of marketing research, the field is increasingly fragmented and specialized. The result is that, following a series of theoretical innovations in the 1980s, progress has all but ended. We ask why marketing scholars have turned away from the ethics of marketing research given the importance of the topic in practice.