Towards a Relational Conception of Branding: what should the brand-consumer relationship be like to enable ethical branding?

Abstract

Ethical branding can be understood as including moral commitments in a corporation’s identity and creating awareness amongst stakeholders of these commitments. This practice can positively influence the financial value of a brand. Accepting the freedom that people have in liberal societies to determine their own moral commitments makes it difficult to evaluate exactly which moral commitments should be taken up by brands in order to achieve ethical branding. Therefore, I will focus on the relationship between brand and consumer and the expressive value of this relationship to set a pre-condition for ethical branding in the form of an ideal brand-consumer relationship that would allow for both brand and consumer to contribute to the expression of each other’s moral identity.