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The art of choosing and the politics of social
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Pykett, Jessica; Jones, Rhys ; Welsh, Marcus; Whitehead, Mark
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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 of
social marketing
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Jessica Pykett , Rhys Jones , Marcus Welsh & Mark Whitehead
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Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Llandinam
Building, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK
Published online: 20 Jan 2014.
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Policy Studies, 2014
Vol. 35, No. 2, 97–114, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2013.875141
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
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(Received 4 July 2012; accepted 22 August 2013)
Social marketing is an increasingly popular method by which governments and public
bodies 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 ‘libertarian
paternalism’. Drawing on interview data with policy strategists, think tank professionals, social marketing advisors and civil servants, the paper argues that careful
attention needs to be paid to the strategic governance issues raised by the use of social
marketing tools in public policy, with a particular focus on the ethics of behavioural
segmentation, context shaping and choice. We argue that there are serious ethical
consequences to a public policy culture, which has become preoccupied with cultivating
the arts of choosing within a methodological and theoretical framework dominated by
the language, tools and techniques of behaviourism, marketisation and consumerism.
Keywords: choice; segmentation; behaviour change; behavioural sciences; public
policy
1. Introduction
Social marketing in UK government departments and public bodies has been growing
steadily since the 1980s. It refers to the use of commercial marketing principles in the
promotion of social ‘goods’, and has at its core the ‘marketing mix’, also known as the
4Ps of product, price, place and promotion. In the case of government-led social
marketing, the product is usually some kind of behavioural change, the price refers to the
costs and inconveniences (to individuals, to the government, to society) of making such
changes, 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 to
achieve) and promotion is all about re-framing problems in ways that will communicate
the behaviour change in its most beneficial terms. Some social marketers add four
additional ‘Ps’ to this traditional mix: ‘publics, partnership, policy and pursestrings’
(Weinreich 1999, 9), denoting the particular concerns that public policy-makers will have
in addition to ‘selling’ the behavioural objective.
This paper applies Foucault’s (2000) insights on governmentality to critically
interrogate the growth of social marketing techniques used by UK Government
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Current address: J. Pykett, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of
Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B152TT, UK
© 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 be
addressed. The paper examines the extent to which social marketing deepens the
marketisation of the core infrastructures of government, illustrated not only by the use of
the methods and theories of advertisers and marketers but also through the contracts
established between government departments and the commercial sector in designing,
delivering and/or funding social marketing initiatives. By analysing social marketing as a
behavioural form of governance, it is possible to interrogate the significant potential
threats it poses to the democratic process, the capability of the citizen and the capacity of
the 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 a
set of tools, techniques and disciplinary knowledge provides the conditions of possibility
within which behavioural styles of governing have been able to emerge within UK public
policy since 2004 (Halpern et al. 2004; Dolan et al. 2010). To this end, section one explores
how social marketing is associated with the loose political philosophy of libertarian
paternalism and the popularisation of behavioural economics (Thaler and Sunstein 2008;
Sunstein and Thaler 2003). We trace these connections and critically interrogate the
strategic governance issues raised by behaviouralist turns in UK policy-making, building
on analytical frameworks developed in previous critiques of libertarian paternalism and
behaviour 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’ is
based on an epistemological reworking of the nature of the human subject as cognitively
flawed, of behaviour as systematically irrational and of public institutions as morally and
psychologically expert arbiters of choice. To this end, they have called into question the
democratic legitimacy of behaviour change in terms of the ability of citizens to consent to
behavioural intervention, the relative openness of various techniques, the opportunities
given to publically deliberate both the means and ends of behaviour change and the
potential for citizen empowerment posed by such techniques.
Secondly, we examine the unintended consequences of social marketing for the
democratic process, citizen capability and the changing role of public bureaucracy. In
section two, the paper reviews the practical use of social marketing techniques through
behaviour change initiatives and relevant policy White Papers since 2006, providing a
cross-sectoral overview, which includes the spheres of health, environment and personal
finance policies. This broad sweep across diverse sectors provides an indication of the
scope and influence of social marketing practice on UK public policy. The paper draws
on interview data carried out between 2008 and 2011 with policy strategists at the
Cabinet Office, government departments, political think tanks, campaigning organisations
and local authorities.1 Interviewees were selected to represent a range of leadership
positions, from personnel responsible for developing policy strategy and shaping public
opinion on behaviour change, through those responsible for the professional development
of civil servants, to staff responsible for implementing behaviour change initiatives across
a variety of policy sectors. The interviews were transcribed and coded using both emic
and etic thematic codes, which were then subject to interpretive and discursive analysis
(Bevir 2011). Distinctions are drawn between the infrastructures, practices and
philosophies of social marketing under New Labour and the Coalition Government since
2010. We divide the many techniques associated with social marketing into three
categories, 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) the
framing of choice in public policy-making. We consider the potential ethical consequences
of a public policy culture, which, it has been argued, has become preoccupied with
cultivating the arts of choosing within a methodological and theoretical framework
dominated by the language, tools and techniques of behaviourism, marketisation and
consumerism (Clarke et al. 2007).2 Social marketing claims itself to signify the evolution of
a more sophisticated, adaptive and personalised form of governance, using methods from
the commercial sector that are known and shown to be effective in influencing voluntary
behaviour. But social marketing experts and practitioners themselves have expressed
concerns over the perceived hypocrisy of and hostility to using the apparently malign tools
of commercial advertising for the social good. Whilst they may settle for asking ‘Why
should the devil have all the best tunes?’ (Hastings 2007, 3), the guiding question for this
paper is to consider whether social marketing poses a threat to the democratic process, the
capability 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, Philip
Kotler and Gerald Zaltman (1971), in an article in The Journal of Marketing that sought
to outline the potential uses of marketing techniques for the achievement of social
objectives and social change. Noting that behavioural scientists found the concept highly
suspicious (1971, 3), Kotler was himself a behavioural scientist trained at the University
of Chicago.3 Conceptually, social marketing has been closely associated with a behavioural approach to choice, judgement and decision-making. Several marketing titles from
the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, brought psychological and social insights into the
purview of marketing techniques (e.g. Bliss 1970; Williams 1981), but it was not until the
1990s that social marketing became more fully established as an international disciplinary
field with its own experts, journals and institutes. The industry journal Social Marketing
Quarterly was set up in 1994, and the Institute for Social Marketing at Stirling University
has been operational since 1992. In the US, authors of well-known social marketing
textbooks have set up their own consultancies. Alan Andreasen established the Social
Marketing Institute in Washington DC in order to ‘advance the science and practice of
social marketing’,4 and Nancy Lee has run Social Marketing Services Inc. since 1993 in
Seattle, providing strategic planning, market research, evaluation, seminars and workshop
sessions. Several national governments have established social marketing expertise; for
instance, the New Zealand Government set up their own social marketing web repository
focusing on health behaviours,5 Health Canada has been advised by Alan Andreasen
himself and supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisations have long
championed the application of social marketing approaches to family planning, nutrition
and disease control predominantly within development policy (Birkinshaw 1989). More
recently, global and national conferences on social marketing have been held (e.g. the
World Non-Profit and Social Marketing Conference since 2010; the Social Marketing and
Behaviour Change conference, London 2010), new journals have been established (the
Journal of Social Marketing [since 2011]) and consultancies and several agencies set up
(for instance, Strategic Social Marketing Ltd. run by Jeff French and Clive BlairStevens,6 and The Hub, established in 20047). In the UK, the most prominent
organisation 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 was
responsible for the publication of It’s Our Health! Realising the potential of effective
social marketing in 2004, which has become a highly influential document in the
development 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 of
behavioural economics and libertarian paternalist approaches to governance. Libertarian
paternalism is a term forwarded by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) in their bestselling behavioural economics book, Nudge, which has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception
by policy strategists in the UK within both New Labour and the Coalition Government. It
sets out an approach to policy-making, which claims to both ensure freedom of choice
and the prevention of social harms or promotion of social welfare. This association
between a political enthusiasm for ‘nudging’ and the use of social marketing tools has
culminated in the recent publication of Changing Behaviour, Improving Outcomes. A New
social marketing Strategy for Public Health (DH 2011), which identifies the importance
of ‘an evidence base for newer ideas (for public health policy), many of them emerging
from behavioural sciences, to change behaviours’ (DH 2011, 7). The language of social
marketing is increasingly framed in these libertarian paternalist terms. In the first issue of
the newly launched Journal of Social Marketing, for instance, Hoek and Jones (2011, 32,
emphasis added) state that social marketing must ‘create stronger and more supportive
choice environments in which risk behaviours are no longer the ‘easy’ option’ – alluding
to Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) notion of ‘choice architectures’ in which default options
are set to ‘nudge’ people to behave in particular ways.
But the relationship between social marketing and the behavioural sciences is not
entirely straightforward, and recent interventions have highlighted the sometimes uneasy
relationship between proponents of behaviour change, behavioural economics and social
marketing. This highlights key distinctions that should be made between social marketing
as 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 question
of ‘why nudging is not enough’ (2011), and Philip Kotler (2011) has challenged the
popularity 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 marketing
is more advanced than behaviour change in its disciplinary history and methodological
rigour. 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 expert
credentials in behaviour change – adding the tagline ‘leading behaviour change’ to the
organisation’s title and essentially reframing their work in the context of behavioural
approaches to policy-making. In this sense, social marketing has become even more adept
in 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 a
novel discipline; a set of tools, techniques and theories; as institutes, organisations and
experts and as a form of knowledge or insight, which is indispensible to the contemporary
policy-maker. Indeed, when the NSMC was originally established, the principles and
practices of social marketing (SM) were used to develop ‘a marketing strategy to increase
the probability that politicians would accept the reviews and recommendations on
utilizing SM’ (French 2008, 292).
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It is worth noting briefly from the outset, however, some key distinctions between
New Labour and the Coalition Government’s approach to social marketing. Whilst many
commentators would see a continuum in the re-framing of health inequalities, financial
problems and environmental crises as the personalised responsibilities of active citizens,
there is also clear water between the Coalition and New Labour’s initiatives of social
marketing, government communications and behaviour change. As one former advisor to
Tony Blair we interviewed noted, there were open discussions about how the commercial
marketing world could provide lessons for a new ‘missionary’ style of governing before
New Labour’s election in 1997 (Geoff Mulgan, interviewed 2 October 2009; see Demos
1995). But decisions taken early on in the Coalition’s administration portray a rather more
extreme vision for the extension of both corporate methods and corporate infrastructures
into policy delivery and policy-making itself. Not long after coming to power, the
Coalition Government announced a radical overhaul of the aforementioned Change4Life
campaign, replacing government funding with corporate sponsorship in exchange for a
more light-touch regulatory approach to the food and drink industry and the curtailing of
the powers of the Food Standards Agency (Sweney 2010). The new Minister for Public
Health, Andrew Lansley, launched an attack on the nagging and nannying tone of social
marketing campaigns, picking particularly on the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign
to improve the nutritional standards of school meals (Triggle 2010). Cuts were announced
to the Central Office of Information (COI) who provided government expertise on
communications and behaviour change, and it was eventually scrapped entirely in July
2011. 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), the
Coalition ‘nudge’ approaches to public health promotion were drawn into social marketing
as 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 and
young people (DH 2011, 8). At the same time, as promoting the idea that marketing
strategies should be based on insights from the behavioural sciences, they called for
‘payment by results’ for commissioned social marketing services. In this sense, the
Coalition’s use of social marketing is closely intertwined with the tools and techniques of
behaviourism and a longer-recognised trend towards marketisation in public policy. So
there have been political gains and losses made by the social marketing industry in recent
years, reflecting concerns over government intervention, charges of nagging and
manipulation and the relative importance placed on personal risk and responsibility. But
one cannot deny that social marketing has been successfully marketed as an essential tool
of government. And beyond party-political wrangling over the appropriate role of the
state, we argue that it is social marketing itself that provides the techniques, intelligence
and infrastructure, which make behavioural form of governance possible. This echoes
Crawshaw’s Foucauldian analysis of health social marketing as a form of neoliberal
governmentality (2012) by which individuals are urged to govern themselves, and
populations are thus governed ‘at a distance’. We show how the techniques of social
marketing raise strategic questions about the possibility of democratic accountability and
citizen capability. To this end, the next section critically analyses the tools and techniques
used in social marketing by the UK Government and public bodies through several
examples of campaigns and initiatives carried out since 2004.
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3. The marketing mix: a critical review of techniques in social marketing
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The effective deployment of the principles of the marketing mix requires three sets of
knowledge and techniques, which we argue make possible behavioural forms of
government 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 as
geodemographic profiling, which allow social marketers to know their target audiences
and the use of choice-framing, which enables social marketers to promote certain
behaviours as easier, more desirable or in some way morally right. In this section, we
critically review these social marketing methods as attempts to govern ‘at a distance’ and
examine 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 all
about influencing behaviour’, and behavioural approaches from social cognitive theories,
exchange theories and Prochaska and DiClemente’s (1992) states of change theory
underpin 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 people
must proceed to make sustained behavioural changes, and to the role of social interaction
in determining learnt behaviours. Social marketing is thus construed explicitly as a
behavioural policy ‘lever’ or toolbox, which is alternative to the more traditional levers of
taxation, legislation and education. Rather than these apparently clunky and indiscriminate levers, the toolkit of social marketers includes consumer insight, psychological
differentiation and segmentation. Consumer Insight research aims to find out as much as
possible 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 go
on to direct the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team, commented that behaviour
change 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 and
government communications methods, it is clear that UK public policy increasingly
draws on consumer insight research and the profiling of target audiences in order to build
more effective policy interventions that build on psychological theories of social and peer
influence. There is now a common sense understanding of the need to start from ‘where
people are’ rather than simply providing advice to the generic public, and this relies on
using methods for knowing ‘where people are’ developed in the commercial sector,
including consumer insight, focus groups, market research surveys and even ethnographic
research (DH 2004). As a Social Marketing Advisor from the Department of Health
stated, social marketing
is based on understanding the audience and understanding why they do things in the first
instance and then building your interventions outward […]that can involve not just
traditional 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 The
Department of Health’s Social Marketing Advisors are embedded within particular teams
and within Primary Care Trusts, providing a cadre of experts consisting of former PR and
advertising professionals and public health practitioners. Indeed, it has become so
mainstream that one member of the NHS Choices team in the Department of Health
(notably employed by business consultancy, Capita), having come from a professional
marketing background, regarded it has just become ‘common sense’:
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you know, it’s about not sending out blanket messages to everybody, but targeting your
messages very specifically to specific groups in their language, in their community, in a way
that they’re more likely to respond. (Interviewed 11 November 2009)
Here she is describing another key method of social marketing, which is the segmentation
of different target audiences into groups of people with similar behavioural or
psychological traits. The Department of Health thus developed a segmentation model,
which aimed to divide the population of England according to the ‘drivers of behaviour
across 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 intelligence
about what has worked elsewhere, together with data about what motivates people, what
they say will help them and perceived barriers’ (DH 2008, 3). This indicates the depth of
information and intelligence used to profile social groups and map behaviours, including
a reliance on population survey data of over 22,000 adults from the British Market
Research Bureau (BMRB). The segmentation model aimed to identify ‘at risk’ population
segments (DH 2008, 5), differentiating between life-stage categories such as ‘Discovery
teens’, ‘Older settlers (no dependants)’ or attitude-based categories such as ‘Thrivers’ and
‘Disengaged’. In practice, segmentation has been used in the development of the NHS
Choices 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 similarly
describes 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 socioeconomic groups. We did that, and then we thought well okay we know basically who these
people are, but we don’t really how to get them to change their ways. So that’s when we
went through to the qualitative stage […] did an initial segmentation, a qualitative
segmentation. We found nine types of drinker […] and that helped us to get an idea of
who we were dealing with, and we employed a psychological model to see who we felt
would be more or less resistant to persuasion. (Interviewed 23 September 2009)
The methods used in segmentation, psychographic profiling and ‘life-stage’ models are
therefore used to identify people who will be more responsive, susceptible or amenable to
behavioural changes and persuasion. Whilst these techniques are highly developed within
the health sector, they are also deployed in personal finance and environmental behaviour
change 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’ve
become more aware that there are particular points in someone’s life where financial
concerns might become more salient. (Interviewed 11 September 2009)
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In addition to life-stage models, psychological differentiation is also emphasised by the
FSA, in their report on Financial Capability: A Behavioural Economics Perspective
(2008, 4). This approach provides an overt challenge to traditional educational
approaches, which focus on the development of financial skills and knowledges:
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people’s financial behaviour may primarily depend on their intrinsic psychological attributes
rather than information or skills or how they choose to deploy them.
Perhaps the most well-known government-developed segmentation model is DEFRA’s
Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours (2007), which divides the public into
segments such as ‘positive greens’ and ‘sideline supports’, based on their environmental
attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, based on survey research. These segments are
considered alongside data concerning people’s ability and willingness to act, motivational
factors, external constraints such as income and self-identification with environmental
causes. The segments were used in order to develop effective and tailored environmental
social marketing, and indeed ‘viral marketing’ (2007, 48) strategies. These did not seek to
radically force behaviour changes, but instead were based on the more subtle ‘choice
editing of products’ (2007, 47), using the ‘influence of personal recommendations’, and
providing consistent communications messages through campaign brands such as Act on
CO2 (2007, 49). But also integral to DEFRA’s framework is a sense of the need for
collective action and sensitivity to the social determinants of behaviour change, perhaps
reflecting the tradition of Community-Based Social Marketing developed within
environmental literatures (McKenzie-Mohr 2000). In this sense, DEFRA’s work on
waste and recycling cannot be said to be individualising, though it remains strongly
associated with a therapeutic approach to group interactions, as opposed to any deeper
theory of social change. As a social researcher from DEFRA pointed out:
weight watchers and alcoholics anonymous are two very good examples of community
groups, and we have learnt from them and their ways of doing things in terms of pledges and
normalisation and information like the 12 steps approach and things like that. (Interviewed
24 September 2009)
What are the implications of behavioural segmentation for the democratic process, citizen
capability and the role of public policy? Segmentation is by no means a neutral tool, and
even some of our interviewees recognised that whilst it enjoys kudos within evidencebased 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 or
behavioural clustering recalls a more suspicious approach to ‘profiling’, which has been
forcefully problematised by critics of securitisation, as a more insidious form of
governing at a distance. When the Department of Health talks of ‘tracking citizen
behaviours’ (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 as
customer insight research – can be used to justify early intervention strategies based
not on how people behave, but on what they might do in the future. Thirdly, by
differentiating the population in this way, social marketing serves to disintegrate the
collective power of the public without – ironically – properly accounting for the public’s
essential cultural diversity and the need to design socially inclusive policy initiatives. It is
Policy Studies
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not then, that segmentation allows public policy-makers to ‘know’ the public. Rather, as
Barnett and Mahony have noted (2011, 14), the methods of segmentation themselves
make publics. The disaggregated public becomes divided by their supposed susceptibility
to behaviour change, to their ‘nudgeability’, as one interviewee from the Policy Exchange
think 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 social
marketing enable too readily the dividing up of the population into elite or sophisticated
groups who do not need to be addressed, and less ‘rational’ groups who require steering
in 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 for
whom actually it does make sense to frame the choices, and then you might even argue that
there 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 the
1970s, with the concept of ‘upstream’ interventions growing in significance (Andreasen
2006, 7; Goldberg 1995). Rather than focusing simply on getting people to behave in
particular ways, social marketing now pays closer attention to the social and environmental determinants, barriers and opportunities for behavioural change and indeed tasks
itself much more with the setting of agendas as opposed to only making step-by-step
changes. This newfound interest in behavioural environments chimes with Thaler and
Sunstein’s notion of ‘choice architectures’, which may range from the design of everyday
spaces such as office blocks or school canteens, but also takes into account the role of
technologies, political systems, education and media channels (Andreasen 2008). Such
upstream considerations relate both to the spatial contexts of decision-making, and to
social influences such as peer influence, social networks and changing social norms to
encourage 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 or
spatially attributed data-sets is thus used to segment populations according to sociodemographic criteria and neighbourhood effects. One former senior policy strategist at the
Department for Energy and Climate Change outlined the use of ‘Mosaic’ approaches to
segmentation for the purposes of targeting environmental behaviour change (interviewed
12 August 2009). Mosaic UK is a geodemographic segmentation or ‘consumer
classification’ system developed by Experian, a global information services company. It
is frequently used by political parties, for instance, in their marketing of electoral
campaign materials. Mosaic classifies populations by neighbourhoods based on the
assumption that like-minded and demographically similar people tend to cluster together
spatially. 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 for
those politicians claiming to best represent this core group. The Social Marketing Advisor
at 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 used
this data to map his alcohol segmentation model onto postcodes in the north-west of
England for the purposes of targeted and tailored direct mail marketing (interviewed
23 September 2009).
The appropriate balance between changing psychologically segmented behaviours
(constituting citizen-subjects) and shaping the spatial and social contexts in which people
collectively act (governing at a distance) is exemplified in the distinction drawn between
downstream and upstream behaviours within the social marketing literature. Understanding this balance is evidently a long-running concern for the social sciences, where debates
around structure and agency prove seemingly insoluble. But more specifically, the use of
geodemographics in the design of social marketing interventions has been critically
scrutinised by human geographers and sociologists alike, and it is to these perspectives
that we now turn. Firstly, the use of geographical information in social marketing has
been criticised for producing socially divisive coded spaces, and secondly, for constructing narrow and delimited consumer identities. As Parker, Uprichard, and Burrows (2007)
have argued, the development of geodemographics software and methods, such as
Mosaic, Acorn and others (using Census data, household surveys and commercial
surveys), has been instrumental in the spatialisation of social class and the ‘informatization of place’ (2007, 905) – the sorting or sociological classification of places into ‘place
classes’ (2007, 902). There are ethical concerns over the ‘recursive loops’ engendered by
geodemographics, which reproduce place-based class identities (2007, 917). Thus, the
power of geodemographics is not in its complex algorithms and multi-level data
production, but in the (highly unscientific and value-laden) naming of particular kinds
of people categories, the visualisation of these labels cartographically and the usefulness
of these techniques as meaningful descriptors (2007, 914). The very existence of
meaningful categories, it is argued, encourages their widespread adoption, and leads to
the clustering of ‘like-labeled’ people who will tend to want to live amongst ‘people like
them’. It is argued that this produces a splintered form of urbanism with deleterious social
consequences and an impoverished political imaginary (Graham and Marvin 2001). More
than simply a sociological question of acting not on ‘reality’ but upon our interpretive
evidence of the world, critics have maintained that geodemographics leads to an
‘algorithmically produced social life’ – constructing highly automated and technologically driven codes that are placed beyond political contestation (Uprichard, Burrows, and
Parker 2009, 2823). This automaticity also serves to obscure the prior negotiations that
take place between government bodies and commercial geodemographics service
providers over what kinds of data will be collected, what kinds of categories named
and how data will be represented. Uprichard, Burrows, and Parker (2009, 2830) assert
that 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 the
purposes for which they are deployed. Services are often provided by corporate providers,
global informatics and market research companies such as Experian and CACI, albeit
being commissioned by, or using research data sometimes provided by government
authorities such as the Office for National Statistics, and reliant on the Royal Mail for
postcode data. Thus for Jon Goss, geodemographics signify a place-based form of
psychological profiling, which is determined by a narrow set of consumption-oriented
criteria whereby social identity becomes a ‘consumption lifestyle that is vulnerable to the
manipulations 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 economic
rationale and necessary pre-occupations of marketing. The core problematic raised here is
the constitutive role of geodemographics in creating ‘truth-effects’ (Goss 1995, 191). By
using personal research data that citizens provide (whether knowingly or not), social
marketing practitioners are then able to sell back to citizens as consumers, a set of
targeted behavioural and identitarian norms that have been amalgamated, refined and
simplified from that very data – producing the very citizen-subjects to be governed.
Whilst these techniques of segmentation are highly sophisticated, this is a form of
differentiation rather than an inclusive sense of diversity. Such techniques tend to
‘manage diversity effectively and ultimately […] (de)limit those identities and demands
in the interest of the producer’ (1995, 187). Diversity and even resistance to
consumption-based identities are themselves adopted as lifestyle markers, which can be
incorporated back into the social marketing strategy. Take, for instance, the NSMC’s
strategy to popularise social marketing. They explicitly segmented their audience into
potential critics and adapted the campaign’s language in order to placate those with an
ideological objection to the ‘excesses of marketing and capitalism’ (French 2008, 293).
Therefore, the geographical knowledge deployed by social marketers raises strategic
political issues around the formation of both individually and spatially divisive
segmentation models. But for other critics, it is a question not of too much, but of too
little geography. This is particularly pertinent in the use of social marketing strategies
within public policies relating to obesity and diet, where some regard ‘upstream’
determinants of behaviour to have been obscured by an overly individualistic approach to
risk. Herrick (2007, 91–92) asserts that there is a need to consider obesity not as a
behavioural issue but as an ‘intrinsically geographical clinical condition’. She argues that
social marketing ‘draws on [the] feeling of responsibility and culpability and, through
market segmentation, tailors risk communication messages to audiences identified by
their consumption habits’ as opposed to focusing on the structural determinants of healthrelated behaviours and access to affordable healthy foods. Seeing social marketing as
overly paternalistic, however, the implied solutions she presents are ironically more
paternalistic – changing cultural attitudes towards obesity, the use of planning legislation
to reduce inequalities in access to healthy foods and providing the infrastructures
necessary 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 ethical
value of this approach has itself been called into question by critics who argue that this
campaign generates a cultural fear of future fatness and unfairly targets children as a form
of ‘pre-emptive politics’ (Evans 2010, 22). By contrast, there are clear signs that the
Coalition Government’s attitude is far from paternalistic. Take for instance, the way in
which they have favoured the further liberalisation and de-regulation of planning and
development decisions (HMG 2010) potentially emasculating the regulatory infrastructure of ‘upstream’ behaviours and the government’s capacity to shape the spatial
environments in which dietary decisions are made and physical activity enabled. It is
clear from these critiques that there is more to marketing behaviour change than the
marketing 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 policy
attention towards the availability and shaping of food choices and the production of fatfearing 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 promotion
and placing of particular choices. Increasingly sophisticated tools of branding, corporate
sponsorship, advertising, the canny use of language, lifestyles and technology and the
framing of choices all play a significant role in the promotion of behavioural goals within
public policy. 5-a-day, Change4Life, Muck in4Life and Act on CO2 are good examples of
the importance of branding and corporate sponsorship in these government-led social
marketing campaigns. 5-a-day was highlighted as the first government-licenced logo in
the Choosing Health White Paper (DH 2004), which noted the need for approaches aimed
at ‘creating a demand for healthy choices’ in the context of a consumer-dominated
society. Producers and food companies are invited to apply for a £100 a year licence to
use 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 social
network.10 Similarly, the NHS-run Change4Life campaign used attractive, colourful and
branded materials in a range of media channels and formats to promote a healthy diet and
physical activity – specifically targeted at families with children younger than 11 years.
The campaign was devised by advertising agency, M and C Saatchi, and sponsored TV
programmes such as the Simpsons, demonstrating novel partnership arrangements
between state and corporate bodies within government communications:
We recognise that many organisations have influence with and can reach our target audiences
in ways that we cannot. Therefore, we will be working with commercial partners to help
influence 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 activity
schemes 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, which
brings together DEFRA’s environmental and conservation projects with the promotion of
physical activity), commercial partners can make use of communications toolkits and
brand assets but must adhere to very specific branding guidelines. This guidance outlines
precisely 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. Language
is also highly specified, for instance the Change4Life campaign explicitly ‘makes dry
information digestible, snappy and memorable. Often it speaks in a way that mums know
their children will get, using simple hooks like rhyming, alliteration, 1–2–3, colloquialisms 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 clear
imperative to re-frame the issue of obesity from one that relates to how people look to the
wider issues of obesity-related illnesses and the desirability of healthier lifestyles (DH
2009, 45). Notably absent is any account of the role of corporate ‘partners’ in creating an
obesity problem in the first place. Instead, toolkits and technologies are also used in order
to enable self-reflection on one’s own lifestyle and encourage particular choices, whether
to 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 a
personalised action plan to cut waste and save money. The NHS Smokefree campaign has
developed mobile phone apps and desktop widgets to help people to quit smoking, and
NHS Choices provides an alcohol calculator to help users to assess their drinking habits
and 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 makes
use of ‘experience architects’ in order to edit, frame and contextualise choices in
certain ways.
Whilst the use of experience architects may be fairly common in web-design, social
marketing is also now concerned with framing choice through the design and placing of
physical ‘choice environments’. The School Food Trust (SFT) was set up as a nondepartmental 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 meals
and cooking skills. Their report A fresh look at the school meal experience (SFT 2009)
includes advice on creating canteen environments that promote healthy choices. Tips
include 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 acoustics
problems, including soft furnishings and soft music (p12). Canteen designers are urged to
think about lighting, art work, naming the space, considering its temperature, the colour
of walls, floors, developing defined zones, providing appropriately sized seating,
speeding up the queuing procedures through pre-ordering, providing food that can be
grabbed and go straight to the till and using cashless systems. Local authority catering
and healthy eating officials who we interviewed saw the adoption of commercial
marketing techniques as the only option in their quest to change children’s eating
behaviours. They saw a need to compete not only with large commercial companies
aggressively marketing unhealthy foods but also with local fast-food outlets and vending
machines close to the schools.
Let us pause to consider the implications of behavioural social marketing within UK
public 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 a
culture 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 the
marketisation of public service delivery and public policy-making itself. Finally, by reframing behavioural insights in terms of individual choices as opposed to political, ethical
and structural concerns, social marketing has the unintended consequence of radically
diminishing the scope of political action and potentially enfeebling public policy.
These are strong claims, but even proponents of social marketing have raised
concerns over the close alliances forged between commercial Social Marketers and state
authorities. Peattie and Peattie (2003) have challenged what they see as the over-reliance
of social marketing theory on principles and practices garnered from the commercial
world. They identify a need to develop new tools and ideas, which are specific to the
public and social concerns of government-led initiatives by tracing social marketing
practice back to its original disciplines. Certainly, it can raise suspicions where the tools
of social marketing are commissioned largely from the commercial sector, where
academic ‘experts’ are hiring themselves out as consultants, and where disciplinary jobtitles are unashamedly sponsored by major corporations (for instance, social marketing
author, Ned Roberto was the Coca-cola Professor of International Marketing at the Asian
Institute of Management in the Philippines [see Kotler and Lee 2008]).
But the cultural and political implications go beyond facile observations of the cosy
connections between commerce and government policy towards a more substantial
critique of an alliance of the ‘persuasive industries’ of which state authorities through
their communications, advertising and propaganda have arguably long been part (Losh
2009, 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 mainstream
advertising 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 behaviours
is also coopted into their amelioration (e.g. the gambling industry in the UK funds the
Gambling Research Education and Treatment Foundation, and the Portman Group of
drinks companies funds the ‘drink aware’ communications programme). Social marketing
can also be criticised for reducing social norms and behaviours to exchangeable
commodities. Its techniques do not simply change behaviour, then, but produce a change
in public rhetoric, actively replacing debate and deliberation with more covert means
derived from advertising and marketing (and we would add, from the behavioural
sciences). This is a concern highlighted by John, Smith, and Stoker (2009) who propose
the more deliberative ‘Think’ in response to the democratic shortcomings of nudge.
Questions over what actually constitute the behavioural goals and social goods to be
pursued are often entirely side-stepped by social marketing professionals who argue this
task is best left to others. Kotler and Lee (2008, 11), for instance, suggest that the UN
Declaration of Human Rights could be used as a framework for ‘good’, though later
argue that the conception of the good may also be a matter of personal ethics, or ‘what
feels right’ (2008, 46). In this sense, social marketing is evacuated of all political and
ethical responsibilities.
The second issue pertaining to the politics of choice specifically within the UK relates
to 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 that
consumer and technology-savvy citizens demand new infrastructures of governing and
public service, which meet with their post-deferential twenty-first century identities. Since
we have been re-imagined as ‘consumer-citizens’ (see Clarke et al. 2007), social
marketing seems entirely apposite for the aspirations of such people for services and
policy initiatives marketed to their personal needs and desires. But we contend that it is
the very tools and techniques of social marketing that serve to legitimise the gradual reframing of both public services and citizen identities as marketable commodities. The
apparent ‘roll back’ of the state, privatisation and the use of management discourse have
all been well documented (Peck and Tickell 2002; Newman 2005), but the alliance of
behavioural theories and social marketing has provided the Coalition Government with
the necessary conditions within which to reframe the purposes of public policy with
renewed 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, and
should be evaluated by a ‘return on investment’ or ‘payment by results’ approach. To a
certain extent, this approach was already set in place under New Labour, when the
Central Office of Information developed the ARTEMIS system for evaluating the Return
on Investment outcomes of communications strategies and social marketing programmes
(DH 2009, 28). However, it is now a crucial part of the public service reforms forwarded
in the Open Public Services White Paper (HMG 2011), which recommends payment by
results alongside the open commissioning of services, more competition between service
providers and controversially allowing the market failure of service providers. That said,
the marketisation of this core government activity of addressing citizens is no longer itself
presented as a political ideology, mere pragmatism, nor cost efficiency. Rather, the state
must 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 of
social goods is a marketing mix aimed at segmented publics and citizen-consumers.
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4. Conclusion: competing in the free market of ideas
As we have already observed, social marketing is deemed increasingly necessary in light
of the behavioural science cultural paradigm currently underpinning public policy-making
in the UK. Presented in the context of an inevitably and apparently unchangeable free
market consumer society, corporate marketing methods provide governments with the
tools to modify people’s behaviour in order to counter the environmental, financial and
health-related excesses of a neoliberal economy. We know that commercial advertisers
now frequently deploy highly self-reflective, parodied and ironic campaigns targeted at
our values, ethics, lifestyles and identities, our sense of fun and even sometimes at our
very opposition to consumption (Frank 1997). In the same way, it is argued that this
corporate-savvy and yet behaviourally susceptible public requires new modes of state
address, which go beyond public information towards more personalised behavioural
interventions. 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 no
longer concern itself with Victorian-scale projects such as sewerage and drainage
infrastructure, but must be tailored to individual needs and actions. But this retreat
from more direct forms of state intervention obscures the fact that social marketing and
behaviour change itself requires an infrastructure that governments have been enthusiastically supporting, both politically and economically. Social marketing institutes,
organisations, consultants, experts and advisors remain reliant on government funding
for research, contracts and sometimes data sources, whilst the behaviour change
‘industry’ is arguably growing in prominence. Furthermore, it is the techniques of social
marketing that have provided the very means by which a behavioural agenda for
governing whole populations can be realised, suggesting that the cumulative outcomes of
social marketing go far beyond the purview of individual schemes, campaigns, projects
and fun-generating mobile phone apps.
We have argued that public policy is being downgraded by the sciences of behaviour
and the arts of choosing. In the free market of ideas, there is a risk that public policy will
retreat from a concern with the ongoing deliberation and setting of political goals and
ideals, nor the provision of public service infrastructures that will provide people with the
contexts, resources and substantive freedoms to improve their lives. By allying itself with
the behavioural sciences, social marketing seeks experimental yet evaluated/proven
techniques for guiding people towards healthy, environmentally friendly and financially
capable decisions, whilst state-funded infrastructures that might enable such action are
withdrawn. But it is not simply that this political agenda is being forced upon us
unwillingly; we have ourselves voluntarily chosen the path of public policy without
infrastructure. Consider the increasingly frequent assertion that:
When asked whose responsibility it is to take care of our health, we answer overwhelmingly
that it is entirely our own responsibility. (DH 2011, 5, original emphasis)
Through the evaluative models of ‘what works’ in social marketing, social inequalities
are reconceptualised in terms of behavioural susceptibilities, ingrained habits, access to
information, 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 to
improve people’s lives. In this paper, however, we have sought to provide a fuller
understanding of the profound unintended consequences of social marketing practice, in
terms of re-constituting citizen-subjects and governing at a distance. We have sought to
demonstrate how it repositions publics as psychologically and geodemographically
segmented, and citizens as suggestible consumers. This has implications for how we
might expand the criteria by which social marketing is evaluated, not in terms of its
capacity to nudge people sub-consciously towards more desirable behaviours or in terms
of Return on Investment, but on its capacity to develop highly conscious and critically
reflexive consumers as citizens, first and foremost.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Interviewees are named where they gave permission or otherwise anonymised.
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 Pensions
in 2009 (CHECK), suggesting that her work is influential in what we are terming here the
behaviour change agenda. Iyengar, like Thaler and Sunstein, favours a dualistic analysis of
choice as a battle between the reflective and automatic systems within the brain.
The University of Chicago is noted elsewhere to be significant in the history of both
neoliberalism and more recently, behavioural economics (Jones et al. 2011b).
www.social-marketing.org/.
www.socialmarketingdownunder.co.nz.
http://strategic-social-marketing.vpweb.co.uk/default.html.
http://www.collaborativechange.org.uk/.
See http://www.experian.co.uk/business-strategies/mosaic-uk-2009.html.
http://www.caci.co.uk/HealthACORN.aspx.
See http://www.5aday.nhs.uk/partners/pressreleases/pharmacies.aspx.
See http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/News/Currentcampaigns/Change4Life/FAQ/index.htm#jumpTo1.
Change 4 Life Brand Guidelines, 5–8 http://www.nhs.uk/Change4Life/Documents/pdf/
C4L_Partner_Guidelines_19032010.pdf.
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