ABSTRACT:
This comprehensive analysis investigates ethical concerns in pharmaceutical marketing, including consumer-facing advertisements and physician-targeted marketing through a systematic review of cross-disciplinary quantitative research from 1990 to 2021. The study reveals inconsistencies in findings due to variations in research designs and populations, compounded by discipline-specific biases. A detailed taxonomy of ethical concerns is introduced, supplemented by insights from scholarly and industry publications and expert interviews. The research advocates for rigorous designs, testing causal inferences, exploring under-researched areas, reconciling conflicting findings, and integrating ethical theories to improve future research. Additionally, the study scrutinizes the ethical dimensions of direct-to-consumer communications in the pharmaceutical industry, presenting ethical practice standards for marketing professionals and proposing an oath to distill essential ethical imperatives related to these communications. Furthermore, it addresses the decline in ethical standards of advertising for pharmaceuticals and explores the connection between advertising for pharmaceuticals strategies, healthcare quality, and patient satisfaction, particularly within the context of Islamic marketing mechanisms. The research emphasises the importance of pharmaceuticals ethical advertising in conjunction with Islamic marketing strategies., with the latter partially mediating healthcare quality and influencing patient satisfaction. The developed framework provides valuable insights for Muslim entrepreneurs, contributing to the understanding of pharmaceutical marketing ethics, Islamic marketing mechanisms, and healthcare quality.