Moral reasoning under profit pressure: How tourism and hospitality marketing practitioners navigate ethical dilemmas in KPI-driven environments

Tourism and hospitality marketers routinely make ethically consequential decisions about framing, disclosure and persuasion while being evaluated against short-term KPIs. This study asks how practitioners navigate ethically ambiguous marketing decisions under KPI-driven profit pressure and how reflective awareness shapes shifts in moral reasoning. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 practitioners in Vietnam, Moral Development Theory provides the primary theoretical lens, while mindfulness research is used as a secondary sensitising lens for reflective regulation. Findings identify three reversible reasoning modes: KPI-normalised compliance, negotiated ethical calibration and principled boundary setting. KPI pressure compresses perceived ethical decision space, while anticipated reputational and career costs make resistance difficult. Reflective awareness does not remove these constraints but can interrupt automatic compliance, support language recalibration and widen consideration of long-term stakeholder trust. The study extends tourism ethics by showing how moral reasoning is situationally enacted in routine marketing work rather than expressed as a fixed moral stage.