Abstract
A warm welcome to this special edition of Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ). In this issue, we focus on European perspectives on social marketing, with contributions that originated as papers in the European Social Marketing Association Conference of 2014. Thanks to Nadina Luca and Natalie Rangelov for their thoughtful reviewing of the material that has led to this special edition.
I’ll get to those in a moment but firstly many thanks to our hosts for having Europeans as guests! Of course, we regularly make contributions to SMQ, but it is nice to take this opportunity for me in this editorial to offer one or views on the notion of a distinctly “European” take on social marketing. I should preface these views by saying firstly that they are my own and haven’t been “road tested” extensively with Euro colleagues—so there may be disagreement. Feel free to get in touch and put me right. Secondly, I’m conscious of the accusation that European, “American,” “Asian,” “Australian,” or indeed perspectives from around the world are bound to be simplistic heuristics for a more complex reality. You may go further and disagree that there is any underlying reality to them at all. Again—do get in touch.
As we know, academic social marketing, like the academic field of marketing itself, originated in the United States. Early European pioneers included the Hastings group, now at Stirling University in Scotland, whose origins reach back to the 1980s. Recent years have seen European social marketing developing into the increasingly consolidated multinational group of academics we have now that in turn support growing professional interest in social marketing across the continent of Europe as well as the United Kingdom.
What seems to be going on over here in Europe? There’s growing interest I think in examining the wider behavior change contexts in which social marketing operates. Matt Wood’s article in this edition is a typical example: Can we make better use of social ecological models in the development of social marketing as a discipline? Models like this lift our heads up and force us to consider wider determinants of behavior—wider social and physical structures like road design, urban density, speed limits, and driver penalties all have massive effects on the uptake of cycling, for example. Across so many sectors, traditional foci on individual behavior are increasingly feeling inappropriate when faced with these macrosocial forces that we now increasingly know influence us. Can I tiptoe into the warm water of cultural differences between continents by opining that this strand of European interest may originate in our (relative to countries such as the United States) tendency to live in collectivist societies? The work of scholars such as Hofstede and Desai demonstrates how individualistic-oriented societies value things like self-reliance, independence, autonomy, and personal achievement, while collectivist cultures might prioritize cooperation, solidarity, and conformity. In collective cultures, therefore, autonomy may come second to relationships with others. I wonder if these cultural norms influence our growing academic interests in relationship within social marketing here in Europe. Perhaps exchange theory and relationship theory within social marketing can grow hand in hand, better reflecting our day-to-day behaviors. Perhaps people iterate in their daily lives between making “trades” based on self-interest while also behaving according to communal or even societal expectations: In Denmark, for example, there are strong cultural pressures not to “stand out from society” in ways that might seem odd in more individually oriented societies. Bringing these debates back to the brass tacks of our field, I’ve noticed increasing interest in the idea of social marketers, at least here in the United Kingdom, working in areas like asset-based community development, youth working, and so on.
Ecological models of behavior change imply a multilevel, multivariate world which, when applied to issues like obesity control or behaviors to combat global warming, explodes into mind-boggling complexity. If behaviors are so complicated, are we being realistic in assumptions we may have that social marketing can solve these on its own? Jeff French’s paper reporting on a pan-European programme (Ecom) addressing outbreak management illustrates this issue. Jeff highlights the need for cross-disciplinary approaches. This is a welcome contribution to this debate; it seems to me that while many social marketers are calling for more cross-disciplinarity, there’s still a dearth of research that actually addresses how we make this happen. Moving between discipline boundaries is easy to talk about but quite hard to do in practice. I’m not sure the blame for this can be laid at the door of our friends in health education, community development, engineering, and the like, without looking at ourselves more critically. I’m going to get into hot water here, but I worry about our tendency to grab hold of, say, a “cooking for health” course originated by health education colleagues, relabel it using 4Ps language (“the cooking course is the product!”) and then claim this intervention as an example of social marketing. What we need of course is an intervention that has been codesigned by both marketers—paying attention to people’s interests and motives and health educationalists—paying attention to their health efficacy. Not rocket science—but perhaps not commonly done as much as we would like.
Striking a balance between Matt Wood and Jeff French’s papers are two from the continent of Europe. Adrian Kammer and colleagues present a comprehensive model that focuses on social marketing communications and how it may be possible to combine various theories of persuasion with the delivery of a social marketing communications campaign in the field. This is a welcome reminder of the help we can try to give practitioners in how best to structure their planning and process of delivery. Eiskje Clason and Denise Meijer gave a fascinating account of their evaluation of a vegetable box intervention aimed at improving healthy food consumption among parents with toddlers.
I think this edition of SMQ illustrates what a rich tapestry of options we have in our field in contributing to both theory and practice. While we didn’t have anything on it in this edition, I’d like to make a plea for more critical social marketing submissions to our journals. Whenever I visit the wonderful United States, I’m always struck by the vigor and energy of businesses there—something I know people there are (justifiably) proud of and something Europeans and others across the world could learn from I suspect. But I also worry that the “business is good” mentality might sometimes get in the way of “critical marketing” approaches to social marketing. I know there is disquiet in the United States of America and indeed across the world of practices such as soda drinks companies sponsoring social marketing interventions in physical activity. There are understandable reasons why cash-strapped and hard-pressed health workers might take these corporate dollars, but the concern has to be that ultimately more harm than good is done. Marketing academics are in a terrific position to expose these debates as clearly as we can to those who have to make these difficult decisions.
I hope you enjoy this special edition. Warm good wishes from Europe to our social marketing friends across the world!