Marketing Ethics and Participation in Online Brand Communities: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Research on brand communities in online scenarios has seen a significant surge over the past two decades, fueled by an increased interest among scholars in areas such as online commerce, especially through social media platforms. This study aims to present a novel approach to map the literature related to marketing ethics with respect to participation in brand communities in online scenarios. The study was conducted with 336 research articles obtained from Scopus database, for the period 2000 to 2025. VOSviewer v1.6.20 and Biblioshiny tools were used to analyze the meta-data, further.

Participation in brand communities in online scenarios, coupled with marketing ethics, are the central purpose of discussion. Using bibliometric tools such as R Studio and Biblioshiny – an online tool based on Bibliometrix platform, meant for scientific analyses (Aria M. and Cuccurullo C. (2017), the major findings of this research reveal significant opportunity areas for enhancing present literature on marketing ethics while seeking participation by members in brand communities in online scenarios, as well as the highest cited authors, the most influential journals, and countries producing the maximum research articles that enriched the field of ethics and participation in brand communities in online scenarios.

The objective of this study is to contribute to the present-day literature in the fields of marketing and business ethics, as well as social media.