The art of choosing and the politics of socialmarketingPykett, Jessica; Jones, Rhys ; Welsh, Marcus; Whitehead, Mark

DOI:10.1080/01442872.2013.875141

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Citation for published version (Harvard):Pykett, J, Jones, R, Welsh, M & Whitehead, M 2014, 'The art of choosing and the politics of social marketing'Policy Studies, vol 35, no. 2, pp. 97-114. DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2013.875141

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The art of choosing and the politics ofsocial marketingJessica Pyketta, Rhys Jonesa, Marcus Welsha & Mark Whiteheada

a Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, LlandinamBuilding, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UKPublished online: 20 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Jessica Pykett, Rhys Jones, Marcus Welsh & Mark Whitehead (2014)The art of choosing and the politics of social marketing, Policy Studies, 35:2, 97-114, DOI:10.1080/01442872.2013.875141

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The art of choosing and the politics of social marketing

Jessica Pykett*, Rhys Jones, Marcus Welsh and Mark Whitehead

Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Llandinam Building, Penglais Campus,Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK

(Received 4 July 2012; accepted 22 August 2013)

Social marketing is an increasingly popular method by which governments and publicbodies deploy marketing principles and techniques in order to achieve ‘social goods’.This paper examines the close relationship between public sector social marketing,a policy mantra focused on ‘behaviour change’ and the political agenda of ‘libertarianpaternalism’. Drawing on interview data with policy strategists, think tank profes-sionals, social marketing advisors and civil servants, the paper argues that carefulattention needs to be paid to the strategic governance issues raised by the use of socialmarketing tools in public policy, with a particular focus on the ethics of behaviouralsegmentation, context shaping and choice. We argue that there are serious ethicalconsequences to a public policy culture, which has become preoccupied with cultivatingthe arts of choosing within a methodological and theoretical framework dominated bythe language, tools and techniques of behaviourism, marketisation and consumerism.

Keywords: choice; segmentation; behaviour change; behavioural sciences; publicpolicy

1. Introduction

Social marketing in UK government departments and public bodies has been growingsteadily since the 1980s. It refers to the use of commercial marketing principles in thepromotion of social ‘goods’, and has at its core the ‘marketing mix’, also known as the4Ps of product, price, place and promotion. In the case of government-led socialmarketing, the product is usually some kind of behavioural change, the price refers to thecosts and inconveniences (to individuals, to the government, to society) of making suchchanges, the place is about targeting the behavioural objective at the most efficient point(making it easier, accessible, providing a pleasant location, ensuring it is convenient toachieve) and promotion is all about re-framing problems in ways that will communicatethe behaviour change in its most beneficial terms. Some social marketers add fouradditional ‘Ps’ to this traditional mix: ‘publics, partnership, policy and pursestrings’(Weinreich 1999, 9), denoting the particular concerns that public policy-makers will havein addition to ‘selling’ the behavioural objective.

This paper applies Foucault’s (2000) insights on governmentality to criticallyinterrogate the growth of social marketing techniques used by UK Government

*Corresponding author. Email: j.pykett@bham.ac.ukCurrent address: J. Pykett, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University ofBirmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B152TT, UK

Policy Studies, 2014Vol. 35, No. 2, 97–114, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2013.875141

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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departments. It considers how social marketing re-positions the citizen as a consumer of‘social goods’, examining how its techniques segment publics into target audiences to beaddressed. The paper examines the extent to which social marketing deepens themarketisation of the core infrastructures of government, illustrated not only by the use ofthe methods and theories of advertisers and marketers but also through the contractsestablished between government departments and the commercial sector in designing,delivering and/or funding social marketing initiatives. By analysing social marketing as abehavioural form of governance, it is possible to interrogate the significant potentialthreats it poses to the democratic process, the capability of the citizen and the capacity ofthe government to take stronger regulatory action in several policy spheres.

Our aims in this paper are two-fold. Firstly, we aim to show how social marketing as aset of tools, techniques and disciplinary knowledge provides the conditions of possibilitywithin which behavioural styles of governing have been able to emerge within UK publicpolicy since 2004 (Halpern et al. 2004; Dolan et al. 2010). To this end, section one exploreshow social marketing is associated with the loose political philosophy of libertarianpaternalism and the popularisation of behavioural economics (Thaler and Sunstein 2008;Sunstein and Thaler 2003). We trace these connections and critically interrogate thestrategic governance issues raised by behaviouralist turns in UK policy-making, buildingon analytical frameworks developed in previous critiques of libertarian paternalism andbehaviour change within political geography (Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead 2011a, 2011b;Pykett et al. 2011; Whitehead, Jones, and Pykett 2011) and the political sciences (John,Smith, and Stoker 2009). These authors have argued that the ‘Behaviour Change agenda’ isbased on an epistemological reworking of the nature of the human subject as cognitivelyflawed, of behaviour as systematically irrational and of public institutions as morally andpsychologically expert arbiters of choice. To this end, they have called into question thedemocratic legitimacy of behaviour change in terms of the ability of citizens to consent tobehavioural intervention, the relative openness of various techniques, the opportunitiesgiven to publically deliberate both the means and ends of behaviour change and thepotential for citizen empowerment posed by such techniques.

Secondly, we examine the unintended consequences of social marketing for thedemocratic process, citizen capability and the changing role of public bureaucracy. Insection two, the paper reviews the practical use of social marketing techniques throughbehaviour change initiatives and relevant policy White Papers since 2006, providing across-sectoral overview, which includes the spheres of health, environment and personalfinance policies. This broad sweep across diverse sectors provides an indication of thescope and influence of social marketing practice on UK public policy. The paper drawson interview data carried out between 2008 and 2011 with policy strategists at theCabinet Office, government departments, political think tanks, campaigning organisationsand local authorities.1 Interviewees were selected to represent a range of leadershippositions, from personnel responsible for developing policy strategy and shaping publicopinion on behaviour change, through those responsible for the professional developmentof civil servants, to staff responsible for implementing behaviour change initiatives acrossa variety of policy sectors. The interviews were transcribed and coded using both emicand etic thematic codes, which were then subject to interpretive and discursive analysis(Bevir 2011). Distinctions are drawn between the infrastructures, practices andphilosophies of social marketing under New Labour and the Coalition Government since2010. We divide the many techniques associated with social marketing into threecategories, which we subject to critical analysis: (1) behavioural segmentation; (2) the use

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of geodemographics in shaping the contexts in which people make decisions and (3) theframing of choice in public policy-making. We consider the potential ethical consequencesof a public policy culture, which, it has been argued, has become preoccupied withcultivating the arts of choosing within a methodological and theoretical frameworkdominated by the language, tools and techniques of behaviourism, marketisation andconsumerism (Clarke et al. 2007).2 Social marketing claims itself to signify the evolution ofa more sophisticated, adaptive and personalised form of governance, using methods fromthe commercial sector that are known and shown to be effective in influencing voluntarybehaviour. But social marketing experts and practitioners themselves have expressedconcerns over the perceived hypocrisy of and hostility to using the apparently malign toolsof commercial advertising for the social good. Whilst they may settle for asking ‘Whyshould the devil have all the best tunes?’ (Hastings 2007, 3), the guiding question for thispaper is to consider whether social marketing poses a threat to the democratic process, thecapability of the citizen and the raison d’être of the public bureaucracy.

2. The re-marketing of social marketing as a behavioural science

Social marketing was a term coined by marketing and management academics, PhilipKotler and Gerald Zaltman (1971), in an article in The Journal of Marketing that soughtto outline the potential uses of marketing techniques for the achievement of socialobjectives and social change. Noting that behavioural scientists found the concept highlysuspicious (1971, 3), Kotler was himself a behavioural scientist trained at the Universityof Chicago.3 Conceptually, social marketing has been closely associated with a behavi-oural approach to choice, judgement and decision-making. Several marketing titles fromthe 1970s and 1980s, for instance, brought psychological and social insights into thepurview of marketing techniques (e.g. Bliss 1970; Williams 1981), but it was not until the1990s that social marketing became more fully established as an international disciplinaryfield with its own experts, journals and institutes. The industry journal Social MarketingQuarterly was set up in 1994, and the Institute for Social Marketing at Stirling Universityhas been operational since 1992. In the US, authors of well-known social marketingtextbooks have set up their own consultancies. Alan Andreasen established the SocialMarketing Institute in Washington DC in order to ‘advance the science and practice ofsocial marketing’,4 and Nancy Lee has run Social Marketing Services Inc. since 1993 inSeattle, providing strategic planning, market research, evaluation, seminars and workshopsessions. Several national governments have established social marketing expertise; forinstance, the New Zealand Government set up their own social marketing web repositoryfocusing on health behaviours,5 Health Canada has been advised by Alan Andreasenhimself and supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisations have longchampioned the application of social marketing approaches to family planning, nutritionand disease control predominantly within development policy (Birkinshaw 1989). Morerecently, global and national conferences on social marketing have been held (e.g. theWorld Non-Profit and Social Marketing Conference since 2010; the Social Marketing andBehaviour Change conference, London 2010), new journals have been established (theJournal of Social Marketing [since 2011]) and consultancies and several agencies set up(for instance, Strategic Social Marketing Ltd. run by Jeff French and Clive Blair-Stevens,6 and The Hub, established in 20047). In the UK, the most prominentorganisation promoting social marketing is the National Social Marketing Centre(NSMC), funded by Consumer Focus and the Department of Health (of which Jeff

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French and Clive Blair-Stevens were incidentally co-founders). The NSMC wasresponsible for the publication of It’s Our Health! Realising the potential of effectivesocial marketing in 2004, which has become a highly influential document in thedevelopment of policy and practice within the Department of Health (NSMC 2006).

In becoming a central policy lever across many sectors of UK public policy-making,social marketing has become closely associated with the recent popularisation ofbehavioural economics and libertarian paternalist approaches to governance. Libertarianpaternalism is a term forwarded by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) in their best-selling behavioural economics book, Nudge, which has enjoyed an enthusiastic receptionby policy strategists in the UK within both New Labour and the Coalition Government. Itsets out an approach to policy-making, which claims to both ensure freedom of choiceand the prevention of social harms or promotion of social welfare. This associationbetween a political enthusiasm for ‘nudging’ and the use of social marketing tools hasculminated in the recent publication of Changing Behaviour, Improving Outcomes. A Newsocial marketing Strategy for Public Health (DH 2011), which identifies the importanceof ‘an evidence base for newer ideas (for public health policy), many of them emergingfrom behavioural sciences, to change behaviours’ (DH 2011, 7). The language of socialmarketing is increasingly framed in these libertarian paternalist terms. In the first issue ofthe newly launched Journal of Social Marketing, for instance, Hoek and Jones (2011, 32,emphasis added) state that social marketing must ‘create stronger and more supportivechoice environments in which risk behaviours are no longer the ‘easy’ option’ – alludingto Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) notion of ‘choice architectures’ in which default optionsare set to ‘nudge’ people to behave in particular ways.

But the relationship between social marketing and the behavioural sciences is notentirely straightforward, and recent interventions have highlighted the sometimes uneasyrelationship between proponents of behaviour change, behavioural economics and socialmarketing. This highlights key distinctions that should be made between social marketingas a set of policy techniques and behaviour change as a political agenda (Jones, Pykett,and Whitehead 2011b). Social marketing consultant, Jeff French has raised the questionof ‘why nudging is not enough’ (2011), and Philip Kotler (2011) has challenged thepopularity of behavioural economics, which he regards as a mere ‘branch of marketing’and as he implies, an embarrassment to most economists. He claims that social marketingis more advanced than behaviour change in its disciplinary history and methodologicalrigour. There is clearly some jostling for disciplinary space here, with ‘behaviour change’approaches currently enjoying prominence. The National Social Marketing Centre(NSMC) even went through a radical re-branding in 2009–2010 to bolster its expertcredentials in behaviour change – adding the tagline ‘leading behaviour change’ to theorganisation’s title and essentially reframing their work in the context of behaviouralapproaches to policy-making. In this sense, social marketing has become even more adeptin using not just the traditional ‘marketing mix’ to achieve social goods (promotion, price,product, place), but in its use of behavioural theories to design effective interventions.And overall it has been exceedingly and unashamedly successful at marketing itself as anovel discipline; a set of tools, techniques and theories; as institutes, organisations andexperts and as a form of knowledge or insight, which is indispensible to the contemporarypolicy-maker. Indeed, when the NSMC was originally established, the principles andpractices of social marketing (SM) were used to develop ‘a marketing strategy to increasethe probability that politicians would accept the reviews and recommendations onutilizing SM’ (French 2008, 292).

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It is worth noting briefly from the outset, however, some key distinctions betweenNew Labour and the Coalition Government’s approach to social marketing. Whilst manycommentators would see a continuum in the re-framing of health inequalities, financialproblems and environmental crises as the personalised responsibilities of active citizens,there is also clear water between the Coalition and New Labour’s initiatives of socialmarketing, government communications and behaviour change. As one former advisor toTony Blair we interviewed noted, there were open discussions about how the commercialmarketing world could provide lessons for a new ‘missionary’ style of governing beforeNew Labour’s election in 1997 (Geoff Mulgan, interviewed 2 October 2009; see Demos1995). But decisions taken early on in the Coalition’s administration portray a rather moreextreme vision for the extension of both corporate methods and corporate infrastructuresinto policy delivery and policy-making itself. Not long after coming to power, theCoalition Government announced a radical overhaul of the aforementioned Change4Lifecampaign, replacing government funding with corporate sponsorship in exchange for amore light-touch regulatory approach to the food and drink industry and the curtailing ofthe powers of the Food Standards Agency (Sweney 2010). The new Minister for PublicHealth, Andrew Lansley, launched an attack on the nagging and nannying tone of socialmarketing campaigns, picking particularly on the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaignto improve the nutritional standards of school meals (Triggle 2010). Cuts were announcedto the Central Office of Information (COI) who provided government expertise oncommunications and behaviour change, and it was eventually scrapped entirely in July2011. Some campaign websites have disappeared, such as the Act on CO2 website,originally aimed at encouraging pro-environmental behaviour.

Meanwhile, in updating the social marketing strategy for Public Heath (DH 2011), theCoalition ‘nudge’ approaches to public health promotion were drawn into social marketingas a means through which to focus more on changing behaviours rather than attitudes.They outlined an approach that will involve ‘far fewer social marketing programmes,prioritising those where there is evidence of efficacy’ – focusing on just 4 campaigns:Smokefree, Change 4 Life and two campaigns aimed at the life-stages of later life andyoung people (DH 2011, 8). At the same time, as promoting the idea that marketingstrategies should be based on insights from the behavioural sciences, they called for‘payment by results’ for commissioned social marketing services. In this sense, theCoalition’s use of social marketing is closely intertwined with the tools and techniques ofbehaviourism and a longer-recognised trend towards marketisation in public policy. Sothere have been political gains and losses made by the social marketing industry in recentyears, reflecting concerns over government intervention, charges of nagging andmanipulation and the relative importance placed on personal risk and responsibility. Butone cannot deny that social marketing has been successfully marketed as an essential toolof government. And beyond party-political wrangling over the appropriate role of thestate, we argue that it is social marketing itself that provides the techniques, intelligenceand infrastructure, which make behavioural form of governance possible. This echoesCrawshaw’s Foucauldian analysis of health social marketing as a form of neoliberalgovernmentality (2012) by which individuals are urged to govern themselves, andpopulations are thus governed ‘at a distance’. We show how the techniques of socialmarketing raise strategic questions about the possibility of democratic accountability andcitizen capability. To this end, the next section critically analyses the tools and techniquesused in social marketing by the UK Government and public bodies through severalexamples of campaigns and initiatives carried out since 2004.

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3. The marketing mix: a critical review of techniques in social marketing

The effective deployment of the principles of the marketing mix requires three sets ofknowledge and techniques, which we argue make possible behavioural forms ofgovernment in the UK: the use of behavioural insights, which inform social marketers’accounts of people’s receptivity to change; the use of spatial data sources such asgeodemographic profiling, which allow social marketers to know their target audiencesand the use of choice-framing, which enables social marketers to promote certainbehaviours as easier, more desirable or in some way morally right. In this section, wecritically review these social marketing methods as attempts to govern ‘at a distance’ andexamine their unintended consequences.

3.1. Behavioural insights: segmentation, psychographic profiling and life-stage models

As social marketing expert, Alan Andreasen (2008, xi) states, ‘social marketing is allabout influencing behaviour’, and behavioural approaches from social cognitive theories,exchange theories and Prochaska and DiClemente’s (1992) states of change theoryunderpin many of the techniques used by social marketers (cited in Kotler and Lee 2008;Hastings 2007). These insights relate to the psychological steps through which peoplemust proceed to make sustained behavioural changes, and to the role of social interactionin determining learnt behaviours. Social marketing is thus construed explicitly as abehavioural policy ‘lever’ or toolbox, which is alternative to the more traditional levers oftaxation, legislation and education. Rather than these apparently clunky and indiscrim-inate levers, the toolkit of social marketers includes consumer insight, psychologicaldifferentiation and segmentation. Consumer Insight research aims to find out as much aspossible about the drivers of behaviour and decision-making amongst policy audiences.For instance, a senior policy strategist at the Institute for Government, who would later goon to direct the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team, commented that behaviourchange was often:

muddled up with what is sometimes called ‘insight’ research, which is what the comms[communications] people do. (David Halpern, interviewed 22 October 2009)

But despite wishing to draw a distinction between behaviour change policies andgovernment communications methods, it is clear that UK public policy increasinglydraws on consumer insight research and the profiling of target audiences in order to buildmore effective policy interventions that build on psychological theories of social and peerinfluence. There is now a common sense understanding of the need to start from ‘wherepeople are’ rather than simply providing advice to the generic public, and this relies onusing methods for knowing ‘where people are’ developed in the commercial sector,including consumer insight, focus groups, market research surveys and even ethnographicresearch (DH 2004). As a Social Marketing Advisor from the Department of Healthstated, social marketing

is based on understanding the audience and understanding why they do things in the firstinstance and then building your interventions outward […]that can involve not justtraditional focus group work, but also ethnographic work, observational stuff and the rest.(Interviewed 23 September 2009)

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It is within the public health sector that social marketing is perhaps most, where TheDepartment of Health’s Social Marketing Advisors are embedded within particular teamsand within Primary Care Trusts, providing a cadre of experts consisting of former PR andadvertising professionals and public health practitioners. Indeed, it has become somainstream that one member of the NHS Choices team in the Department of Health(notably employed by business consultancy, Capita), having come from a professionalmarketing background, regarded it has just become ‘common sense’:

you know, it’s about not sending out blanket messages to everybody, but targeting yourmessages very specifically to specific groups in their language, in their community, in a waythat they’re more likely to respond. (Interviewed 11 November 2009)

Here she is describing another key method of social marketing, which is the segmentationof different target audiences into groups of people with similar behavioural orpsychological traits. The Department of Health thus developed a segmentation model,which aimed to divide the population of England according to the ‘drivers of behaviouracross the six public health priority areas’ of smoking, obesity, alcohol, substance misuse,sexual health and mental health (DH 2008, 2). This framework used ‘demographic,behavioural psychographic and epidemiological data, prior evidence and intelligenceabout what has worked elsewhere, together with data about what motivates people, whatthey say will help them and perceived barriers’ (DH 2008, 3). This indicates the depth ofinformation and intelligence used to profile social groups and map behaviours, includinga reliance on population survey data of over 22,000 adults from the British MarketResearch Bureau (BMRB). The segmentation model aimed to identify ‘at risk’ populationsegments (DH 2008, 5), differentiating between life-stage categories such as ‘Discoveryteens’, ‘Older settlers (no dependants)’ or attitude-based categories such as ‘Thrivers’ and‘Disengaged’. In practice, segmentation has been used in the development of the NHSChoices website, which serves as an information portal for health-based decision-making,and is aimed at ill-health prevention. The Social Marketing Advisor at DH similarlydescribes how segmentation was used to target audiences for alcohol harm messages:

and so we started to zero in on our audience, who tended to be over 35 from the lower socio-economic groups. We did that, and then we thought well okay we know basically who thesepeople are, but we don’t really how to get them to change their ways. So that’s when wewent through to the qualitative stage […] did an initial segmentation, a qualitativesegmentation. We found nine types of drinker […] and that helped us to get an idea ofwho we were dealing with, and we employed a psychological model to see who we feltwould be more or less resistant to persuasion. (Interviewed 23 September 2009)

The methods used in segmentation, psychographic profiling and ‘life-stage’ models aretherefore used to identify people who will be more responsive, susceptible or amenable tobehavioural changes and persuasion. Whilst these techniques are highly developed withinthe health sector, they are also deployed in personal finance and environmental behaviourchange initiatives. As Joy Beishon from the Consumer Research and Evaluation team,Financial Services Authority (FSA) commented:

some of our work, and increasingly so now, is linked to life stages and actually we’vebecome more aware that there are particular points in someone’s life where financialconcerns might become more salient. (Interviewed 11 September 2009)

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In addition to life-stage models, psychological differentiation is also emphasised by theFSA, in their report on Financial Capability: A Behavioural Economics Perspective(2008, 4). This approach provides an overt challenge to traditional educationalapproaches, which focus on the development of financial skills and knowledges:

people’s financial behaviour may primarily depend on their intrinsic psychological attributesrather than information or skills or how they choose to deploy them.

Perhaps the most well-known government-developed segmentation model is DEFRA’sFramework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours (2007), which divides the public intosegments such as ‘positive greens’ and ‘sideline supports’, based on their environmentalattitudes, beliefs and behaviours, based on survey research. These segments areconsidered alongside data concerning people’s ability and willingness to act, motivationalfactors, external constraints such as income and self-identification with environmentalcauses. The segments were used in order to develop effective and tailored environmentalsocial marketing, and indeed ‘viral marketing’ (2007, 48) strategies. These did not seek toradically force behaviour changes, but instead were based on the more subtle ‘choiceediting of products’ (2007, 47), using the ‘influence of personal recommendations’, andproviding consistent communications messages through campaign brands such as Act onCO2 (2007, 49). But also integral to DEFRA’s framework is a sense of the need forcollective action and sensitivity to the social determinants of behaviour change, perhapsreflecting the tradition of Community-Based Social Marketing developed withinenvironmental literatures (McKenzie-Mohr 2000). In this sense, DEFRA’s work onwaste and recycling cannot be said to be individualising, though it remains stronglyassociated with a therapeutic approach to group interactions, as opposed to any deepertheory of social change. As a social researcher from DEFRA pointed out:

weight watchers and alcoholics anonymous are two very good examples of communitygroups, and we have learnt from them and their ways of doing things in terms of pledges andnormalisation and information like the 12 steps approach and things like that. (Interviewed24 September 2009)

What are the implications of behavioural segmentation for the democratic process, citizencapability and the role of public policy? Segmentation is by no means a neutral tool, andeven some of our interviewees recognised that whilst it enjoys kudos within evidence-based policy-making, ‘the science of segmentation is not a science at all’ (David Halpern,interviewed 22 October 2009). At one level, the idea of psychographic, attitudinal orbehavioural clustering recalls a more suspicious approach to ‘profiling’, which has beenforcefully problematised by critics of securitisation, as a more insidious form ofgoverning at a distance. When the Department of Health talks of ‘tracking citizenbehaviours’ (DH 2011, 69), concerns over data protection become more salient. Secondly,as Nicolas Rose (2010) has pointed out, the identification and targeting of ‘at risk’groups – whether based on psychological categorisations, or in this case portrayed ascustomer insight research – can be used to justify early intervention strategies basednot on how people behave, but on what they might do in the future. Thirdly, bydifferentiating the population in this way, social marketing serves to disintegrate thecollective power of the public without – ironically – properly accounting for the public’sessential cultural diversity and the need to design socially inclusive policy initiatives. It is

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not then, that segmentation allows public policy-makers to ‘know’ the public. Rather, asBarnett and Mahony have noted (2011, 14), the methods of segmentation themselvesmake publics. The disaggregated public becomes divided by their supposed susceptibilityto behaviour change, to their ‘nudgeability’, as one interviewee from the Policy Exchangethink tank put it (Robert McIlveen, interviewed 23 September 2009). As Whitehead,Jones, and Pykett (2011) have noted, there is a risk too that the methods of socialmarketing enable too readily the dividing up of the population into elite or sophisticatedgroups who do not need to be addressed, and less ‘rational’ groups who require steeringin particular directions for their own (and others’) good:

the finance sector is a good [example]. You have some kinds of very sophisticated users who,you don’t need to do this, they can just do their own thing. And then there are others forwhom actually it does make sense to frame the choices, and then you might even argue thatthere are some for which you want to frame the choices very aggressively. (David Halpern,interviewed 22 October 2009)

3.2. Spatial ‘upstream’ behaviours: geodemographics and consumer classification

The ‘mix’ of tools and techniques of social marketing has evolved substantially since the1970s, with the concept of ‘upstream’ interventions growing in significance (Andreasen2006, 7; Goldberg 1995). Rather than focusing simply on getting people to behave inparticular ways, social marketing now pays closer attention to the social and environ-mental determinants, barriers and opportunities for behavioural change and indeed tasksitself much more with the setting of agendas as opposed to only making step-by-stepchanges. This newfound interest in behavioural environments chimes with Thaler andSunstein’s notion of ‘choice architectures’, which may range from the design of everydayspaces such as office blocks or school canteens, but also takes into account the role oftechnologies, political systems, education and media channels (Andreasen 2008). Suchupstream considerations relate both to the spatial contexts of decision-making, and tosocial influences such as peer influence, social networks and changing social norms toencourage behaviour change.

The targeting of upstream behaviours involves spatial techniques that again aim to‘know’ the public or understand the target audience. The use of geodemographics orspatially attributed data-sets is thus used to segment populations according to socio-demographic criteria and neighbourhood effects. One former senior policy strategist at theDepartment for Energy and Climate Change outlined the use of ‘Mosaic’ approaches tosegmentation for the purposes of targeting environmental behaviour change (interviewed12 August 2009). Mosaic UK is a geodemographic segmentation or ‘consumerclassification’ system developed by Experian, a global information services company. Itis frequently used by political parties, for instance, in their marketing of electoralcampaign materials. Mosaic classifies populations by neighbourhoods based on theassumption that like-minded and demographically similar people tend to cluster togetherspatially. Their 67 types are grouped into 15 clusters ranging from ‘Professional Rewards’(e.g. mid-career climbers) and ‘Small Town Diversity’ (e.g. hardworking families) to‘Claimant Cultures’ (e.g. new parents in need).8 Evidently, the segment labelled‘hardworking families’ has come to prominence in UK party, political point-scoring forthose politicians claiming to best represent this core group. The Social Marketing Advisorat DH also spoke to us about his use of HealthACORN, another consumer classification

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tool developed by market research companies, CACI and Kantar Healthcare.9 He usedthis data to map his alcohol segmentation model onto postcodes in the north-west ofEngland for the purposes of targeted and tailored direct mail marketing (interviewed23 September 2009).

The appropriate balance between changing psychologically segmented behaviours(constituting citizen-subjects) and shaping the spatial and social contexts in which peoplecollectively act (governing at a distance) is exemplified in the distinction drawn betweendownstream and upstream behaviours within the social marketing literature. Understand-ing this balance is evidently a long-running concern for the social sciences, where debatesaround structure and agency prove seemingly insoluble. But more specifically, the use ofgeodemographics in the design of social marketing interventions has been criticallyscrutinised by human geographers and sociologists alike, and it is to these perspectivesthat we now turn. Firstly, the use of geographical information in social marketing hasbeen criticised for producing socially divisive coded spaces, and secondly, for construct-ing narrow and delimited consumer identities. As Parker, Uprichard, and Burrows (2007)have argued, the development of geodemographics software and methods, such asMosaic, Acorn and others (using Census data, household surveys and commercialsurveys), has been instrumental in the spatialisation of social class and the ‘informatiza-tion of place’ (2007, 905) – the sorting or sociological classification of places into ‘placeclasses’ (2007, 902). There are ethical concerns over the ‘recursive loops’ engendered bygeodemographics, which reproduce place-based class identities (2007, 917). Thus, thepower of geodemographics is not in its complex algorithms and multi-level dataproduction, but in the (highly unscientific and value-laden) naming of particular kindsof people categories, the visualisation of these labels cartographically and the usefulnessof these techniques as meaningful descriptors (2007, 914). The very existence ofmeaningful categories, it is argued, encourages their widespread adoption, and leads tothe clustering of ‘like-labeled’ people who will tend to want to live amongst ‘people likethem’. It is argued that this produces a splintered form of urbanism with deleterious socialconsequences and an impoverished political imaginary (Graham and Marvin 2001). Morethan simply a sociological question of acting not on ‘reality’ but upon our interpretiveevidence of the world, critics have maintained that geodemographics leads to an‘algorithmically produced social life’ – constructing highly automated and technologic-ally driven codes that are placed beyond political contestation (Uprichard, Burrows, andParker 2009, 2823). This automaticity also serves to obscure the prior negotiations thattake place between government bodies and commercial geodemographics serviceproviders over what kinds of data will be collected, what kinds of categories namedand how data will be represented. Uprichard, Burrows, and Parker (2009, 2830) assertthat such discussions will not be neutral, but will already reflect social norms, prejudices,the projected use of data and knowledge deemed to be potentially credible.

Geodemographic practices cannot be divorced from their original rationale and thepurposes for which they are deployed. Services are often provided by corporate providers,global informatics and market research companies such as Experian and CACI, albeitbeing commissioned by, or using research data sometimes provided by governmentauthorities such as the Office for National Statistics, and reliant on the Royal Mail forpostcode data. Thus for Jon Goss, geodemographics signify a place-based form ofpsychological profiling, which is determined by a narrow set of consumption-orientedcriteria whereby social identity becomes a ‘consumption lifestyle that is vulnerable to themanipulations of the industry’ (1995, 187). This, it is argued, reduces the complexities of

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consumer motivation to measurable and simplified data-sets according to the economicrationale and necessary pre-occupations of marketing. The core problematic raised here isthe constitutive role of geodemographics in creating ‘truth-effects’ (Goss 1995, 191). Byusing personal research data that citizens provide (whether knowingly or not), socialmarketing practitioners are then able to sell back to citizens as consumers, a set oftargeted behavioural and identitarian norms that have been amalgamated, refined andsimplified from that very data – producing the very citizen-subjects to be governed.Whilst these techniques of segmentation are highly sophisticated, this is a form ofdifferentiation rather than an inclusive sense of diversity. Such techniques tend to‘manage diversity effectively and ultimately […] (de)limit those identities and demandsin the interest of the producer’ (1995, 187). Diversity and even resistance toconsumption-based identities are themselves adopted as lifestyle markers, which can beincorporated back into the social marketing strategy. Take, for instance, the NSMC’sstrategy to popularise social marketing. They explicitly segmented their audience intopotential critics and adapted the campaign’s language in order to placate those with anideological objection to the ‘excesses of marketing and capitalism’ (French 2008, 293).

Therefore, the geographical knowledge deployed by social marketers raises strategicpolitical issues around the formation of both individually and spatially divisivesegmentation models. But for other critics, it is a question not of too much, but of toolittle geography. This is particularly pertinent in the use of social marketing strategieswithin public policies relating to obesity and diet, where some regard ‘upstream’determinants of behaviour to have been obscured by an overly individualistic approach torisk. Herrick (2007, 91–92) asserts that there is a need to consider obesity not as abehavioural issue but as an ‘intrinsically geographical clinical condition’. She argues thatsocial marketing ‘draws on [the] feeling of responsibility and culpability and, throughmarket segmentation, tailors risk communication messages to audiences identified bytheir consumption habits’ as opposed to focusing on the structural determinants of health-related behaviours and access to affordable healthy foods. Seeing social marketing asoverly paternalistic, however, the implied solutions she presents are ironically morepaternalistic – changing cultural attitudes towards obesity, the use of planning legislationto reduce inequalities in access to healthy foods and providing the infrastructuresnecessary for ensuring locally based demand for healthy choices. To a certain degree,social marketing does include explicit attempts to change cultural attitudes, for instance,in the Change4Life campaign’s aspirations to become a social movement. But the ethicalvalue of this approach has itself been called into question by critics who argue that thiscampaign generates a cultural fear of future fatness and unfairly targets children as a formof ‘pre-emptive politics’ (Evans 2010, 22). By contrast, there are clear signs that theCoalition Government’s attitude is far from paternalistic. Take for instance, the way inwhich they have favoured the further liberalisation and de-regulation of planning anddevelopment decisions (HMG 2010) potentially emasculating the regulatory infrastruc-ture of ‘upstream’ behaviours and the government’s capacity to shape the spatialenvironments in which dietary decisions are made and physical activity enabled. It isclear from these critiques that there is more to marketing behaviour change than themarketing mix. There are wider historical and cultural factors that demand closer scrutiny.In the specific context of health, diet and fitness, there is a strong case for shifting policyattention towards the availability and shaping of food choices and the production of fat-fearing anxieties.

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3.3. Framing choices: place, price, product, promotion

Some of the more well-known methods used in social marketing relate to the promotionand placing of particular choices. Increasingly sophisticated tools of branding, corporatesponsorship, advertising, the canny use of language, lifestyles and technology and theframing of choices all play a significant role in the promotion of behavioural goals withinpublic policy. 5-a-day, Change4Life, Muck in4Life and Act on CO2 are good examples ofthe importance of branding and corporate sponsorship in these government-led socialmarketing campaigns. 5-a-day was highlighted as the first government-licenced logo inthe Choosing Health White Paper (DH 2004), which noted the need for approaches aimedat ‘creating a demand for healthy choices’ in the context of a consumer-dominatedsociety. Producers and food companies are invited to apply for a £100 a year licence touse the logo on their packaging. There has been a high-profile TV advertising campaign,a website with resources, recipes, videos, games and a 5-a-day web-based socialnetwork.10 Similarly, the NHS-run Change4Life campaign used attractive, colourful andbranded materials in a range of media channels and formats to promote a healthy diet andphysical activity – specifically targeted at families with children younger than 11 years.The campaign was devised by advertising agency, M and C Saatchi, and sponsored TVprogrammes such as the Simpsons, demonstrating novel partnership arrangementsbetween state and corporate bodies within government communications:

We recognise that many organisations have influence with and can reach our target audiencesin ways that we cannot. Therefore, we will be working with commercial partners to helpinfluence people’s behaviour. We will do this by tapping into the power of brand loyalties –working to make changes in food manufacturing, shopping habits, supporting new activityschemes and spreading the word in the press, television and radio. (Change4Life campaign)11

As part of the Change4Life campaign (as with Act on CO2 and Muck in4 Life, whichbrings together DEFRA’s environmental and conservation projects with the promotion ofphysical activity), commercial partners can make use of communications toolkits andbrand assets but must adhere to very specific branding guidelines. This guidance outlinesprecisely what copy is required on partners’ campaign literatures, what prefixes to‘4 Life’ can be used and detailed design, colour, font and minimum logo sizes. Languageis also highly specified, for instance the Change4Life campaign explicitly ‘makes dryinformation digestible, snappy and memorable. Often it speaks in a way that mums knowtheir children will get, using simple hooks like rhyming, alliteration, 1–2–3, colloquial-isms etc.’ ‘It is friendly and supportive. It rarely uses the word obesity’ […] ‘It clarifies,cajoles and chivvies’.12 The point about using such language is that there is a clearimperative to re-frame the issue of obesity from one that relates to how people look to thewider issues of obesity-related illnesses and the desirability of healthier lifestyles (DH2009, 45). Notably absent is any account of the role of corporate ‘partners’ in creating anobesity problem in the first place. Instead, toolkits and technologies are also used in orderto enable self-reflection on one’s own lifestyle and encourage particular choices, whetherto do with diet, smoking or even climate change. The Act on CO2 website, for example,had a carbon calculator, which allowed users to measure their energy use and develop apersonalised action plan to cut waste and save money. The NHS Smokefree campaign hasdeveloped mobile phone apps and desktop widgets to help people to quit smoking, andNHS Choices provides an alcohol calculator to help users to assess their drinking habitsand lifestyle choices. Again, the campaigns and tools developed by NHS Choices are

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based on consumer insight research – specifically from Capita Insight Team – and makesuse of ‘experience architects’ in order to edit, frame and contextualise choices incertain ways.

Whilst the use of experience architects may be fairly common in web-design, socialmarketing is also now concerned with framing choice through the design and placing ofphysical ‘choice environments’. The School Food Trust (SFT) was set up as a non-departmental public body by the Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCSF)in 2005 (since 2011 it has become a national charity) to provide advice on school mealsand cooking skills. Their report A fresh look at the school meal experience (SFT 2009)includes advice on creating canteen environments that promote healthy choices. Tipsinclude staggering lunchtimes so pupils can all have seats at a table, using outside spaces,mobile food servers, improving the ambience of the room and dealing with acousticsproblems, including soft furnishings and soft music (p12). Canteen designers are urged tothink about lighting, art work, naming the space, considering its temperature, the colourof walls, floors, developing defined zones, providing appropriately sized seating,speeding up the queuing procedures through pre-ordering, providing food that can begrabbed and go straight to the till and using cashless systems. Local authority cateringand healthy eating officials who we interviewed saw the adoption of commercialmarketing techniques as the only option in their quest to change children’s eatingbehaviours. They saw a need to compete not only with large commercial companiesaggressively marketing unhealthy foods but also with local fast-food outlets and vendingmachines close to the schools.

Let us pause to consider the implications of behavioural social marketing within UKpublic policy in shaping the wider politics of choice. The issues raised here are three-fold.First, it has been argued that social marketing does not simply reflect, but creates aculture of consumerism in the sphere of government-driven behaviour change. Secondly,we have noted that it provides further evidence of a longer running shift towards themarketisation of public service delivery and public policy-making itself. Finally, by re-framing behavioural insights in terms of individual choices as opposed to political, ethicaland structural concerns, social marketing has the unintended consequence of radicallydiminishing the scope of political action and potentially enfeebling public policy.

These are strong claims, but even proponents of social marketing have raisedconcerns over the close alliances forged between commercial Social Marketers and stateauthorities. Peattie and Peattie (2003) have challenged what they see as the over-relianceof social marketing theory on principles and practices garnered from the commercialworld. They identify a need to develop new tools and ideas, which are specific to thepublic and social concerns of government-led initiatives by tracing social marketingpractice back to its original disciplines. Certainly, it can raise suspicions where the toolsof social marketing are commissioned largely from the commercial sector, whereacademic ‘experts’ are hiring themselves out as consultants, and where disciplinary job-titles are unashamedly sponsored by major corporations (for instance, social marketingauthor, Ned Roberto was the Coca-cola Professor of International Marketing at the AsianInstitute of Management in the Philippines [see Kotler and Lee 2008]).

But the cultural and political implications go beyond facile observations of the cosyconnections between commerce and government policy towards a more substantialcritique of an alliance of the ‘persuasive industries’ of which state authorities throughtheir communications, advertising and propaganda have arguably long been part (Losh2009, 30). For one contemporary critic of government media-making, Elizabeth Losh, it

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is no mere irony that social marketing uses the very same techniques as the mainstreamadvertising industry, which has created many of the social ills that it seeks to address(2009, 72). In some instances, the very industry that promotes problematised behavioursis also coopted into their amelioration (e.g. the gambling industry in the UK funds theGambling Research Education and Treatment Foundation, and the Portman Group ofdrinks companies funds the ‘drink aware’ communications programme). Social marketingcan also be criticised for reducing social norms and behaviours to exchangeablecommodities. Its techniques do not simply change behaviour, then, but produce a changein public rhetoric, actively replacing debate and deliberation with more covert meansderived from advertising and marketing (and we would add, from the behaviouralsciences). This is a concern highlighted by John, Smith, and Stoker (2009) who proposethe more deliberative ‘Think’ in response to the democratic shortcomings of nudge.Questions over what actually constitute the behavioural goals and social goods to bepursued are often entirely side-stepped by social marketing professionals who argue thistask is best left to others. Kotler and Lee (2008, 11), for instance, suggest that the UNDeclaration of Human Rights could be used as a framework for ‘good’, though laterargue that the conception of the good may also be a matter of personal ethics, or ‘whatfeels right’ (2008, 46). In this sense, social marketing is evacuated of all political andethical responsibilities.

The second issue pertaining to the politics of choice specifically within the UK relatesto the production of a common-sense notion that public service delivery must now be‘personalized’ – that the post-war ‘one-size-fits-all’ model is now defunct and thatconsumer and technology-savvy citizens demand new infrastructures of governing andpublic service, which meet with their post-deferential twenty-first century identities. Sincewe have been re-imagined as ‘consumer-citizens’ (see Clarke et al. 2007), socialmarketing seems entirely apposite for the aspirations of such people for services andpolicy initiatives marketed to their personal needs and desires. But we contend that it isthe very tools and techniques of social marketing that serve to legitimise the gradual re-framing of both public services and citizen identities as marketable commodities. Theapparent ‘roll back’ of the state, privatisation and the use of management discourse haveall been well documented (Peck and Tickell 2002; Newman 2005), but the alliance ofbehavioural theories and social marketing has provided the Coalition Government withthe necessary conditions within which to reframe the purposes of public policy withrenewed vigour. In Changing Behaviour, Improving Outcomes (2011, 8), for instance,social marketing is put forward as a practice that should not rely on public money, andshould be evaluated by a ‘return on investment’ or ‘payment by results’ approach. To acertain extent, this approach was already set in place under New Labour, when theCentral Office of Information developed the ARTEMIS system for evaluating the Returnon Investment outcomes of communications strategies and social marketing programmes(DH 2009, 28). However, it is now a crucial part of the public service reforms forwardedin the Open Public Services White Paper (HMG 2011), which recommends payment byresults alongside the open commissioning of services, more competition between serviceproviders and controversially allowing the market failure of service providers. That said,the marketisation of this core government activity of addressing citizens is no longer itselfpresented as a political ideology, mere pragmatism, nor cost efficiency. Rather, the statemust enter into corporate contracts for social marketing because it is more human.Evidence on the very nature of the human condition, backed up by the epistemological

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truths of the behavioural sciences is used to argue that ‘what works’ in the pursuit ofsocial goods is a marketing mix aimed at segmented publics and citizen-consumers.

4. Conclusion: competing in the free market of ideas

As we have already observed, social marketing is deemed increasingly necessary in lightof the behavioural science cultural paradigm currently underpinning public policy-makingin the UK. Presented in the context of an inevitably and apparently unchangeable freemarket consumer society, corporate marketing methods provide governments with thetools to modify people’s behaviour in order to counter the environmental, financial andhealth-related excesses of a neoliberal economy. We know that commercial advertisersnow frequently deploy highly self-reflective, parodied and ironic campaigns targeted atour values, ethics, lifestyles and identities, our sense of fun and even sometimes at ourvery opposition to consumption (Frank 1997). In the same way, it is argued that thiscorporate-savvy and yet behaviourally susceptible public requires new modes of stateaddress, which go beyond public information towards more personalised behaviouralinterventions. The analogy popular with the Cabinet Office and Behavioural Insight Team(referred to by at least two of our interviewees) is that government intervention can nolonger concern itself with Victorian-scale projects such as sewerage and drainageinfrastructure, but must be tailored to individual needs and actions. But this retreatfrom more direct forms of state intervention obscures the fact that social marketing andbehaviour change itself requires an infrastructure that governments have been enthusi-astically supporting, both politically and economically. Social marketing institutes,organisations, consultants, experts and advisors remain reliant on government fundingfor research, contracts and sometimes data sources, whilst the behaviour change‘industry’ is arguably growing in prominence. Furthermore, it is the techniques of socialmarketing that have provided the very means by which a behavioural agenda forgoverning whole populations can be realised, suggesting that the cumulative outcomes ofsocial marketing go far beyond the purview of individual schemes, campaigns, projectsand fun-generating mobile phone apps.

We have argued that public policy is being downgraded by the sciences of behaviourand the arts of choosing. In the free market of ideas, there is a risk that public policy willretreat from a concern with the ongoing deliberation and setting of political goals andideals, nor the provision of public service infrastructures that will provide people with thecontexts, resources and substantive freedoms to improve their lives. By allying itself withthe behavioural sciences, social marketing seeks experimental yet evaluated/proventechniques for guiding people towards healthy, environmentally friendly and financiallycapable decisions, whilst state-funded infrastructures that might enable such action arewithdrawn. But it is not simply that this political agenda is being forced upon usunwillingly; we have ourselves voluntarily chosen the path of public policy withoutinfrastructure. Consider the increasingly frequent assertion that:

When asked whose responsibility it is to take care of our health, we answer overwhelminglythat it is entirely our own responsibility. (DH 2011, 5, original emphasis)

Through the evaluative models of ‘what works’ in social marketing, social inequalitiesare reconceptualised in terms of behavioural susceptibilities, ingrained habits, access toinformation, social influence, will-power and the art of choosing the right choices. No

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doubt social marketers and the civil servants who commission their services set out toimprove people’s lives. In this paper, however, we have sought to provide a fullerunderstanding of the profound unintended consequences of social marketing practice, interms of re-constituting citizen-subjects and governing at a distance. We have sought todemonstrate how it repositions publics as psychologically and geodemographicallysegmented, and citizens as suggestible consumers. This has implications for how wemight expand the criteria by which social marketing is evaluated, not in terms of itscapacity to nudge people sub-consciously towards more desirable behaviours or in termsof Return on Investment, but on its capacity to develop highly conscious and criticallyreflexive consumers as citizens, first and foremost.

Notes1. Interviewees are named where they gave permission or otherwise anonymised.2. We take the phrase the ‘art of choosing’ from book by Professor of Business and social

psychologist, Sheena Iyengar (2010), who gave a talk to the Department of Work and Pensionsin 2009 (CHECK), suggesting that her work is influential in what we are terming here thebehaviour change agenda. Iyengar, like Thaler and Sunstein, favours a dualistic analysis ofchoice as a battle between the reflective and automatic systems within the brain.

3. The University of Chicago is noted elsewhere to be significant in the history of bothneoliberalism and more recently, behavioural economics (Jones et al. 2011b).

4. www.social-marketing.org/.5. www.socialmarketingdownunder.co.nz.6. http://strategic-social-marketing.vpweb.co.uk/default.html.7. http://www.collaborativechange.org.uk/.8. See http://www.experian.co.uk/business-strategies/mosaic-uk-2009.html.9. http://www.caci.co.uk/HealthACORN.aspx.10. See http://www.5aday.nhs.uk/partners/pressreleases/pharmacies.aspx.11. See http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/News/Currentcampaigns/Change4Life/FAQ/index.htm#jumpTo1.12. Change 4 Life Brand Guidelines, 5–8 http://www.nhs.uk/Change4Life/Documents/pdf/

C4L_Partner_Guidelines_19032010.pdf.

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