Introduction to the special issue

Citation

Basil, M. (2015), "Introduction to the special issue", Journal of Social Marketing, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-09-2015-0064

Introduction to the special issue

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Social Marketing, Volume 5, Issue 4

Social marketing is often criticized, and is often self-critical, of our tendency to focus on individual or “downstream” change instead of “upstream” structural factors (Cherrier and Gurrieri, 2014). There are likely several reasons for our focus on individual efforts. Chief among these are political constraints that arise from our liberal (or neo-liberal) governments’ foundation on John Stuart Mill’s notion of freedom:

[…] the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others […]. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant (John Stuart Mill, 1856).

This fundamental assertion is both directly and indirectly responsible for much of social marketing’s focus on downstream individual change instead of “upstream” conditions (Pykett, 2012). This focus on individual behavior can be seen in many public health efforts that arise from these same forces. As a result of this focus on individual behavior, our efforts often involve trying to get hundreds or thousands of people to change their behavior instead of changing the structural factors in only a few communities or states. In many cases when social marketers or health advocates attempt upstream changes, we are often derisively dismissed as attempting to impose a “nanny state” that runs counter to Mill’s notion of individual freedom (Calman, 2009).

Having recently attended the 2015 World Social Marketing Conference in Sydney, I was struck by Joel Bakan’s paraphrasing Marx as “we make our own choices but we do not choose our own circumstances”. For me this notion of “Dialectical determinism” or “Parametric determinism” is a useful framework I think we can and should use to address upstream conditions. I was reminded of my experience living in Australia in 2008 and 2009 where the notion of giving people a “fair go” appeared to be an almost universal covenant. As a field I think we could frame many upstream efforts as simply providing people a fair chance of success to eat right, exercise or improve their social conditions in the face of forces stacked against us. We all benefit from doing better, so why not give people a fair chance at achieving success in their individual efforts by not stacking the deck against them?

Is the deck really stacked against us? In “Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire”, Cross and Proctor (2014) document how commercial marketing efforts over the past 100 years have developed and made “junk food” and other convenience products much cheaper and more readily available. In many cases, these products and habits are the very ones that social marketing and health efforts are trying to reduce. Given our limited resources, it is almost impossible for us to match these commercial efforts. One power of the commercial enterprise is that they often generate their own pool of resources that allow the efforts to be self-sustaining.

Why is this happening? Over the past 100 years, there has also been a more complete acceptance of Mill’s notion of freedom through a general acceptance of capitalism, and especially laissez-faire capitalism, by governments and citizens. One positive outcome of this is that consumers now have increasing power to shape the world around them. This has resulted in improvements in the quality of life in many aspects of modern life. However, one consequence is the growth of industrial efforts where the externalities and their costs are not fully realized. One example is processed and fast food. There are a couple of important externalities. First is the simple matter of increasing availability that makes fast food not only increasingly more available but at a decreasing cost. Second, the profits from this operation mean tax revenues to governments. It may also result in funds that can influence the political decision-making process. This money leads to legitimization and hegemony for fast food. So the foundational assumption of free-market capitalism may lead to irrational outcomes such as obesity and increasing health care costs that are borne by the state and taxpayers. If we had a full economic model of the benefits versus costs of increasing fast food, what choice would we make?

While many commercial efforts are financially self-sustaining in terms of short-term profits, those of us in the social marketing realm often try to reduce the costs of this externalities of these commercial enterprises. In many situations, we are often beholden to grants from state organizations eager to reduce the costs of people’s “free-choice” behaviors. Playing into system means that we are not at liberty to challenge governments’ acceptance that people’s choices are simply a matter of individual decisions in one-off situations. This leaves us unable to assert that many of these decisions are at least partly as a result of circumstances.

So are there any ways we can try to alter the upstream social conditions? This special edition consists of articles based on efforts at changing upstream conditions. Three of the papers here were from the 2014 SMART – Social Marketing Advances in Theory and Research – Conference held at Chateau Lake Louise on the edge of a glacial lake in Banff National Park in Canada. I found that the small conference in this amazing location helped provide a great basis for stimulating thought in this area.

These presentations and now articles provide some examples where structural changes have been applied. I hope reading through these will present you with ideas on how we may be able to better enhance the circumstances that affect our choices.

In the first paper, Mitchell, Madill and Chreim explain how non-profit social enterprise efforts can, through marketing activities, facilitate social transformations. Although this is accomplished one organization at a time, this allows interventions to change more than one person at a time. The implications for society can be even larger because sometimes these efforts, through recognition by a few individuals, can bring large-scale changes to entire communities.

Burton and Nesbit, in the second paper, examines the effectiveness of a measure to examine how environmental cues can tempt smokers to smoke or buy cigarettes. Training respondents to make an immediate voice recording of their temptations provides insight into a number of possible triggers, often around the retail environment as well as being in an environment where they often smoke, such as outside. In these instances, the circumstances are not of their own choosing.

In the third paper, Erickson, Barken and Barken study the adoption and success of an elementary school garden, a type of intervention that is growing in popularity in the field of public health. One school’s efforts can result in several teachers and hundreds of students gaining knowledge of produce and their cultivation, as well as, more importantly, eating more healthily. Ideally this type of intervention can encourage many participants to start a garden at home to grow fruits and vegetables for their whole family.

The next two papers were not part of our SMART conference, but accepted as part of regular submissions to the Journal. Interestingly, though, although neither addressed structural forces directly, there are structural issues that arise from both papers.

Diaz Meneses and Luri Rodríguez examine women’s breastfeeding behavior. They examine individual knowledge and attitudinal factors on both short-term and long-term breastfeeding behaviors. Their models are very predictive, but especially on short-term behavioral prediction. They raise the possibility of societal or structural factors in their discussion and I would predict that these structural factors may play a larger role in the maintenance of breastfeeding over the longer time frame. No man, or woman, as they say, is an island.

Finally, Truong and colleagues examines a structural issue within the field of social marketing itself – the level of internationalization. They do this through examining authorship of papers published in Social Marketing Quarterly and the Journal of Social Marketing as well as authors’ self-identification in the field of social marketing as recorded on Google Scholar. They conclude with some ideas on structural changes that may increase internationalization of our field.

Aside from the content of these articles, I believe the notion of social conditions is an important metaphor for the special issue itself. Although these articles are largely a result of the individual efforts of their authors, they have all benefited from previous theory and research of those who have gone ahead of us to provide a foundation for this inquiry. I know that the articles have also benefited from the conference review process and feedback at the conference itself, so an acknowledgment of reviewers and other attendees’ role in this should be acknowledged. I also believe that each of the manuscripts was strengthened from the usual review process for the Journal, which, again, should acknowledge the reviewers, host institutions and state and other forms of financial assistance that support our endeavors. Finally, I hope that these articles will add to the body of work from which later research will build and hopefully our society or societies can strive to improve upon the human experience.

Michael Basil

Faculty of Management, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada

References

Calman, K. (2009), “Beyond the ‘nanny state’: stewardship and public health”, Public Health, Vol. 123 No. 1, pp. e6-e10.

Cherrier, H. and Gurrieri, L. (2014), “Framing social marketing as a system of interaction: a neo-institutional approach to alcohol abstinence”, Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 30 Nos 7/8, pp. 607-633.

Cross, G.S. and Proctor, R.N. (2014), Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Pykett, J. (2012), “The new maternal state: the gendered politics of governing through behaviour change”, Antipode, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 217-238.