Marketing's Moral Myopia: A Normative Critique of Harmful Product Marketing through the Lens of the AMA Definition.

This paper examines the ethical conflict between the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) definition of marketing—which emphasizes creating value for customers and society—and the marketing of harmful products such as tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-processed foods that contribute to significant public health crises. Using normative marketing theory, stakeholder theory, and ethics frameworks, it argues that promoting these products contradicts marketing’s stated social value purpose and challenges the moral legitimacy of marketing systems that commodify harm. The authors propose a conceptual framework assessing alignment between marketing purpose, practice, and outcomes, highlighting systemic ethical failures in harmful product marketing and calling for realignment through managerial responsibility, policy reform, and enhanced ethics education. The paper concludes that to maintain legitimacy, marketing must reject practices that knowingly cause population-level harm and commit to creating genuine social value in accordance with the AMA’s definition.