Marketing ethics is an area of applied ethics which deals with the moral principles behind the operation and regulation of marketing. Some areas of marketing ethics (ethics of advertising and promotion) overlap with media and public relations ethics.

Marketing ethics can be divided into two categories:

Positive marketing ethics looks at the statement "what is" when it comes to examining marketing practices. An example would be to research fraudulent advertising and keep a record of the violations.

Normative marketing ethics looks at theories that dictate how moral marketing should take place. The theories and substructures used in business ethics to determine its level of morality are used to analyze whether moral marketing is taking place in normative marketing ethics. The three structures are known as duty-based theories, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism.

None of these frameworks allow, by itself, a convenient and complete categorization of the great variety of issues in marketing ethics.

Contrary to popular impressions, not all marketing is adversarial, and not all marketing is stacked in favor of the marketer. In marketing, the relationship between producer/consumer or buyer/seller can be adversarial or cooperative. For an example of cooperative marketing, see relationship marketing. If the marketing situation is adversarial, another dimension of difference emerges, describing the power balance between producer/consumer or buyer/seller. Power may be concentrated with the producer (caveat emptor), but factors such as over-supply or legislation can shift the power towards the consumer (caveat vendor). Identifying where the power in the relationship lies and whether the power balance is relevant are important in understanding the background to an ethical dilemma in marketing ethics.

A popularist anti-marketing stance commonly discussed in the blogosphere and popular literature is that any kind of marketing is inherently evil. The position is based on the argument that marketing necessarily commits at least one of three wrongs:

Market research is the collection and analysis of information about consumers, competitors and the effectiveness of marketing programs. With market research, businesses can make decisions based on the responses of the market, leading to a better understanding of how the business should adapt to the changing market. It is used to establish which portion of the population will or does purchase a product, based on age, gender, location, income level, and many other variables. This research allows companies to learn more about past, current, and potential customers, including their specific likes and dislikes. Meticulous codes of ethics have been devised by multiple professional institutions which aim to communicate conflicts that occur during the implementation of marketing research (The European Society of Marketing and Opinion Research, the Market Research Society, and the Council for Survey Research are a few examples).