By Dr Fiona Spotswood
As we repeat like a stuck record to our undergraduate
marketing students, marketing is about providing stakeholder value. As such,
marketing is pretty much everything a business does, from managing the supply
chain to engaging with customers and keeping employees happy. To be sustainable,
an organisation needs to keep going and to keep making profits. It’s not going
to do that if the resources it or its suppliers disappear or become so scarce
that the prices of its products skyrocket and alienate its customers so its
profits plunge. Sustainable businesses make profit and therefore marketing is a
force for sustainability.
That marketing is a force for sustainability was the subject
of a Chartered Institute for Marketing seminar I attended this morning, and
presenter Victoria
Hurth from Plymouth University has, with colleagues, drawn up a framework
for assessing the true sustainability of a business organisation. It starts,
she explained, with a new basic paradigm for marketers. The ‘sense and respond’
paradigm, which means marketers seek to understand their customers and provide
products accordingly, is outdated, unsustainable and shirks their
responsibility as the powerful creators of
unsustainable needs. A new paradigm is the ‘relate and co-create’ approach,
which is more about a focus on all stakeholders, including the customers of the
future, and about working with these stakeholders to create sustainable
business practices that meet everyone’s
needs. Other parts of Victoria’s framework include taking leadership, focusing
on the future, putting marketing at the heart of business practice and of
course measurement. Her vision is that if embedded in business practice, the
framework can create organisational culture change.
Victoria lingered on the subject of ‘needs’ for some time.
There are various models which explain how ‘needs’ impact us. Essentially,
humans have a basic set of needs which underpin all our activities, and
particularly consumption. These have been sorted hierarchically (by Maslow,
most famously), weighted differently and variously described and listed. But
essentially they are fairly stable over time and geographies. In a sense,
‘needs’ are at the heart of traditional behaviour change thinking; the downstream,
individualist version. People ‘need’ to eat energy dense food, use their cars
to get around, go on long haul holidays and buy mountains of cheap clothing. Traditional
‘behaviour change’ works to combat these needs by persuading people that they
don’t ‘need’ to do these behaviours after all and that there is an alternative.
This route has severe limitations, however, and rather ignores the power of
marketers in shaping the ways the needs are ‘solved’ in unsustainable and
unhealthy ways.
Where my research interests intersect with Victoria’s is at
this point. What if, as I would argue (vociferously), there is an alternative
paradigm for framing the notion of ‘behaviour’ or ‘needs’ in the context of
behaviour change, in form of Social Practice Theory. According to this SPT,
behaviour is the function of societal
structures; sets of meanings, competences and materials, for instance, which
combine to frame the performance of different practices. Practices, such as car
driving, food shopping and so on, are performed but are also entities for study
and can be the focus of intervention.
Take the practice of eating breakfast as an example. It is
performed every day by most people. It is societally structured by the
materials (available foodstuffs), competences (cooking skills) and meanings (no
one eats broccoli for breakfast) that make up the practice. People perform the
practice within this set of elements and it can be studied as an entity by
looking at how these elements interrelate and exist in relation to other,
overlapping practices. However, breakfast cereals are so often not the best
nutritional choices for us. If we try and persuade people that their ‘need’ for
Crunchy Nut Cornflakes is misplaced, we are battling against a practice which
is embedded in society and shaped strongly by a powerful marketing machine
which has established a strong set of meanings – and products (materials) around
breakfast that involves the message about ‘eating breakfast cereal as standard’
and that ‘low fat is best’. Neither of
these are ‘true’ or indeed helpful, of course.
Thinking about ‘behaviour’ and ‘needs’ once again, it is
possible to see how Social Practice Theory could enable us to study the role of
marketing on the practices which make
up our lives and to study the potential for sustainable business practices on
changing these practices so that our behaviour becomes ultimately more
sustainable, or healthy, or both.
Materialism is a good example. Research has identified that
British children are some of the most materialistic in Europe[i].
The ‘behaviour’ at play is over-consumption; the ‘needs’ are those of parents
to provide material goods for their children to prove their worth or allay
their guilt, and for children to own the latest stuff to mark out their
territory in the social hierarchies of the playground. But what is just as
important to focus on is the impact of business (i.e. marketing) on the
practice of consumption, parenting, childhood socialising and so on. Marketers
provide the material goods with which children trade popularity and parents
seek to buy affection and allay guilt. Marketers provide the meanings
associated with these material goods; that without the latest (fill in the gap)
you are a failure in some way. The competences with which the material goods
are associated are intrinsic; brand knowledge and knowing how to brag to your
friends without sounding arrogant. (This is based on a research by Nairn and
Spotswood, 2015[ii]).
Thus, examining materialism through the eyes of Social Practice Theory
highlights the role of marketing in creating the conditions in which unsustainable and harmful behaviour is
performed. As such, it also highlights the role of marketing in creating a more
sustainable business model in which these unfavourable fallouts are less likely
to occur.
Perhaps it is simpler to look at this approach when
considering a behaviour that is harmful to the environment, like driving. A
‘behaviour change’ approach might be to persuade more people to cycle. This has
its place, but a sustainable marketing model would be to consider the future of
burning fossil fuels at the present rate and realise churning out more cars in
the present model isn’t going to deliver value to all stakeholders in the future. But people ‘need’ cars. They want
them, demand them, so the ‘sense and respond’ model would have the industry
producing more cars because that is what is demanded. But Social Practice
Theory would allow us to focus on why and how the practice of driving has
become so embedded in society, and realise that the ‘meanings’ associated with
it are in large part created by the marketing of cars; they are sexy, fast, comfortable
and linked to status and power. Simply meeting the demand for more car
consumption, however, is an unsustainable model. Rather, car manufacturers and
their marketing departments could be focusing on changing the meanings of the
‘practice of car driving’ so that the focus is on energy efficiency, technological
longevity, safe disposal and so on. The meanings change, then so do the ‘needs’
of customers and the business model is sustainable because there will still be
customers, resources and products (and therefore profits) in generations to
come.
The relationship between ‘marketing as a force for
sustainability’ and a sociological perspective is apparent if not developed.
The next stage is to unpick this relationship and frame it as part of the
future ‘behaviour change’ agenda.
