Fun, easy and popular
the social practice way
Amongst its critics, social marketing has been most often
castigated for relying too heavily on individualistic, downstream approaches to
social change. I would add to the list of criticisms – which include a lack of
rigorous evaluation, evidence, theoretical transparency, cost-effectiveness and
impact, that it is unwilling to embrace innovative theory from disciplines
other than psychology. However, I also argue that often social marketers have
understood the nub of a social problem without necessarily being able to
explain it in authoritative, theoretical terms. Like their commercial marketing
cousins, they have a good sense of what makes the world tick.
One example is the decade old social marketing mantra, ‘fun
easy and popular’. Not claimed to be grounded in any great theoretical tradition,
social marketers just had a sense that behaviour change interventions needed to
be fun, easy for people to do, and move people in the general direction of
travel within their cultural context, and not against it. “Start where people
are now”, I would be told by managers when I worked as a social marketing
consultant. “Find out what moves and motivates people”.
Rather than simply join the throngs willing to criticise
social marketing, this article aims to bolster social marketing’s kudos by
exploring ‘fun, easy, popular’ from a social practice perspective, thereby
adding theoretical scaffolding to an otherwise flimsy concept. Practice
theories have been gaining momentum in ‘behaviour change’, since a seminal
article by Reckwitz in 2002 reinvigorated our interest. The article revisited
the work of early practice theorists like Bourdieu and Giddens, which suffered
from obfuscate explanation, and pricked the ears of those seeking innovative
ways to understand and tackle the wicked problems of the day. In the sustainability
field, a practice theoretical perspective has now widely been acknowledged as
providing a potential framework for a conceptually advanced understanding of
the reason people act in environmentally unsound ways, for a way of intervening
in a full, holistic, naturally interdisciplinary way and, perhaps most
importantly, for a way of conceptualising societal problems which does not
automatically place individual behaviours at the heart of the problem, when a
complex context is at work in the background guiding decision makers down
pre-determined paths.
Practice theory comes from a sociological heritage and is
considered to be in its third wave now (Warde, 2014). Like all theory, it can
be used to draw certain phenomena into the foreground and de-emphasise others.
To understand its key tenets, the foreground in question must include a focus
on the practice itself and not the individuals who perform it. Life, so goes
the theory, is made up of practices, which are routinized, often unnoticed and
unconsidered, and which individuals perform every day. Examples are eating
breakfast, getting dressed, checking emails, making tea, having a shower. These
practices are made up of certain elements – competences (skills required to
perform them), meanings and materials. By understanding the elements which
interact which make up a practice, we can begin to see how a practice has
evolved. Being clean used to mean having a bath once a week, but now we shower
often twice a day. The materials have changed – we have electricity, hot
showers, bathrooms. The meanings have changed – being clean and fresh is a
cultural norm. The competences have changed – we no longer need to fill a tin
bath with kettles, but have to remember to turn on the extractor fan.
Practice theory also affords a great number of other
insights into the way action is organised. For example, practices compete with
each other to recruit participants; elements of practices are intertwined with
neighbouring practices so often individual practices cannot be singled out for
analysis; practices are unavoidable (there is nothing outside practices);
meanings and competences can be embedded in material things. The list goes on.
Perhaps the most important, however, is the way practice theory sidesteps the
thorny issue of structure vs agency which necessarily plagues behaviour change
thinking. If people are considered to have agency above all else, then
interventions which presume the power of their rational, goal-directed decision
making will result. If structure is considered a more important influence on
behaviour then activities to change the ‘wider determinants’ will result. In
truth, neither solution is complete and both quickly reach their natural
capacity.
In contrast, practice theory side-steps this conundrum.
Practices are structures which guide activity. We cannot shower without
engaging with the practice of showering and its constituent elements. However,
the practice only exists because it is being performed, and through performance
it can be reconstituted and recalibrated. This is how practices evolve.
Back to ‘fun’, ‘easy’ and ‘popular’, using ‘children eating
healthy snacks’ as an example.
Easy: The key relevant practices here are parental shopping
practices and family eating routines, although there are others such as food
preparation, storage, parents’ rewarding of children, TV watching (snack food
advertising practices) and so on. (And already the potential for
interdisciplinary, holistic perspectives afforded by practice theory rise to
the top).
A starting point is that practices must recruit
practitioners to survive and regenerate. Practitioners must have the relevant
competences to succeed, and if they do not (and a practice is therefore ‘hard’)
they will fail to re-perform the practice. If the competences are in place and
the practice is ‘easy’ to perform, then meanings will reflect this and a
practice will acquire the meaning of ‘easy’. Opening a packet of crisps is
‘easy’ (requires fewer competences) than peeling an apple.
Insights for intervention: Social marketing can have a role
in expanding the meanings around family food practices, for example working
with supermarkets to label fruit as ‘easy snacking’ and crisps/confectionary as
‘party food’. Competences can be hybridized into the material by providing
pre-prepared healthy foods for children’s snack times. There are problems,
however, with the mis-marketing of so-called ‘healthy’ snacks for children which
are high in sugar and other interventions will be required to tackle these
upstream problems. A sugar tax on snacks like the one slapped on fizzy drinks
today might have an impact, for example.
Popular: Practices are performed by communities of people,
who share a similar worldview (Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’). Within the same context,
people tend to perform the same practices in similar ways, although performance
will always vary a bit. People embody a sense of practical knowledge about how
to perform a practice (like eating meals three times a day) and what is the
‘right’ way of doing something (such as not eating curry for breakfast). This
practical knowledge is largely invisible to practitioners but highly visible
when someone is not conforming. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect
practitioners to leap from one way of doing things (e.g. crisps in a lunch box)
to an alternative (fruit) without a more gentle evolution of the practice; so
it gets chance to become embodied. This interpretation of ‘popular’ is less
about social comparison and more about social order. There is a perceived ‘right’ way of doing things.
Related to this is that the more practitioners who perform a
practice, the more ‘normal’ it becomes and the harder it is to avoid. Again, a
gentle evolution is more likely to achieve this sense of ‘normal’ than sudden
or enforced changes.
Intervention implications: Social marketing has a potential role
here in preparing the way for practice evolution. Much like with the smoking
ban, which simply took the final step in an already strong march towards
practice change (Blue et al, 2016), social marketing activities can change
meanings and competences around snacking which contribute to an ‘natural’ evolution
in snacking practice. The role of materials is also important, and social
marketers can work with manufacturers, for example, to produce lunchboxes which
are attractive to children and parents and which afford (lend themselves
to/make it possible to) storing fruit and vegetable snacks more easily. Again,
such activities will compete with the thrust of much snack food industry
marketing, which presents snacking on refined and processed foods as a natural
phenomenon loaded with meanings around good parenting and motherly devotion. To
tackle the ferocity of these messages, it is likely that stronger regulation
would be required (Hastings and de Andrade, 2016).
Fun: In practice theoretical terms, ‘fun’ is considered
either as a meaning of the practice itself (a ‘teleoaffective structure’
(Schatzki, 2002), or as a mechanism which is ‘of the practice’ but embodied by
the practitioner. This depends on whether strong practice theory (aka Shove) or
a weaker version is in play. As a meaning, it is possible to see how social
marketing has a role in branding healthy snacks, whether manufactured (low
sugar cereal bars) or otherwise (satsumas) to provide a set of associations in
parents and children’s minds between the healthy snack and it being ‘fun’. This
is the heartland of marketing. If ‘fun’ is considered a mechanism embodied by
the practitioner, then further theoretical analysis is required (and there is
considerable room in practice theory for theoretical development (Warde,
2014)). However, the role of marketing in supporting the ‘fun’ meaning is
fairly straightforward.
Conclusion
‘Fun, easy and popular’ is an example of a mantra of early
social marketing that has led to its dismissal by ‘serious’ behaviour change
scholars who lambast its lack of theoretical rigor and downstream focus (see
Truong, 2014). Clearly the focus of ‘fun easy popular’ is the individual, but
examined from a practice perspective, it is possible to shift perspectives, and
even paradigms, and begin to see how a practice theoretical approach reframes
the problem (of, in this example, children’s unhealthy snacking) and considers
the contribution of materials, competences and meanings in the framing of
individuals’ (collective) performances. Social marketing can have a role in
intervening to change the links between elements and contribute to the
reformulation of practices which are problematic to society.
What is also clear from this brief analysis, however, is
that social marketing – within the commonly understood boundaries of the
discipline – cannot contribute straightforwardly to intervening to change the
materials of snacking practices (the production of unhealthy snackfoods
targeting children), nor have much effect on adjoining and clearly strongly
bundled practices, such as those of snackfood manufacturers and marketers. Here
we are entering the debate around ‘upstream social marketing’, which is much
discussed in the literature but of which there is little evidence (Truong,
2014). Lobbying, regulation and policy change are the interventions required at
this level, and a critical marketing understanding may be useful, but the
change agents are more likely to be policy makers, politicians and the
corporate sector itself.
A practice theoretical perspective offers huge potential for
social marketers to grapple in a more robust way with behaviour change by
removing the ‘behavioural’ aspect (the individual) and instead focusing on how
their particular skillset might contribute to interventions targeting practice
change. Social marketers have a natural sense of the ways the world works but
are not necessarily as adept at theoretical innovation as they need to be to
establish themselves as a valid and respected discipline within the behaviour
change community. Practice theory might therefore be a foothold for change;
both for social marketing as a discipline but also for many of the wicked
problems it seeks to address.
For further discussion please contact the author direct - Fiona2.spotswood@uwe.ac.uk
References:
Bourdieu, P.
(1985a) The genesis of the concepts of Habitus and of Field. Sociocriticism,
2 (2), 11-24.
Reckwitz, A. (2002), “Toward a theory of social practices: A
development in culturalist theorizing”, European Journal of
Social Theory, 5(2), 243-263.
Schatzki, T. (2002), The Site of the Social: A
Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change,
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Truong, V. D. (2014) Social Marketing: A Systematic Review of Research
1998–2012. Social Marketing Quarterly, 20(1),
15-34.
Warde, A.
(2014) After-taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture, November.
