Thinking
about Harry Potter is almost
inevitable. I know Christ Church College’s dining hall was the location that
inspired the movie’s shootings but in this one, the Keble College’s, also in
Oxford, we could equally expect the delivering of a howler (an object created by J.K. Rowling in Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets (1998): a magic letter that speaks its message in the
writer’s voice and bursts into flames ending up in ashes).
In 2007, it
was here that I met Jeff French for the first time. I had explained my research
project to him and asked for his support and authorization for accessing the
National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC), of which he was the director. This was
a way in towards the main purpose of my research – to follow, as a crucial case
study, the British national social marketing strategy, initiated in 2004,
understanding how it emerged, developed and was implemented, in order to use
their lessons to support similar social marketing processes in other countries.
As you have
already understood, this academic book about social marketing, marketing,
marketing thought, public policy and policy processes, is for those who believe
in the betterment of life in their societies, the life of their fellow citizens
submitted to all the problems that we had inherited, that we had created or in
which we are involved.
In 1992, I
started teaching social marketing at the Higher Institute of Business
Communication (ISCEM), in Lisbon, Portugal, a young and small institution that
benefitted from the advantages of private initiative in higher education,
gathering a set of experienced professionals, innovative and more open to the
introduction of modern teaching than traditional Portuguese university
institutions. I think that one was the first teaching experience of social
marketing in Portugal.
Before
1992, thanks to my brief training in economics at the Higher Institute of
Economic and Financial Sciences (now the School of Economics and Management of
the University of Lisbon, ISEG) in the early 1970s (although interrupted by my
arrest in 1971 and 1973 by the dictatorship’s political police), I had been
working since 1983 in the area of marketing and communication in certificated
companies such as BBDO or BJKE (currently Bozell) in Portugal. This one was
owned by the SONAE industrial and commercial group, the greatest Portuguese
one. In 1992, I participated in a political marketing consultants’ group that
supported one of that year’s national legislative election campaigns.
An ISCEM
innovation, a ground-breaking for the time in Portugal, was the setting up of a
public communication chair, which I was invited to teach, having immediately
integrated the social marketing dimension refreshed by the recent publication
of Kotler & Roberto’s book, Social
Marketing Strategies for Changing Public Behavior (1989). From then on, I
dedicated myself to this area. In 1994, in a marketing management course at the
same school, I was already teaching an autonomous social marketing class.
Unknown to
me before the previously book by Kotler & Roberto, I admit that my interest
in this area was motivated by a similar one by Heede (1985):
«[these
early critical scholars] took their degrees in marketing, perhaps by
happenstance, because they, as outsiders, wanted to study how the modern
society was functioning so that they could change it in accordance with the
values they were exposed to in their youth. As they ended up as young
professors in marketing departments where they discovered that the marketing
system was corrupting them. Therefore they want to change the system from
inside by creating a new marketing system suitable for the society they want.»
(p. 148)
When the
first Portuguese post-graduation course in political and social marketing was
introduced in the Higher Institute of Labour and Enterprise Sciences (currently
ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon) in 2002, I had the pleasure of both
co-directing and teaching it. In that same year, in the article «The efficiency
of public communication: For an integrated perspective of communication, social
marketing and public policy» (Santos, 2002), I stood up for an enlarged
perspective of social marketing, mainly inspired by Wallack (1989). Bearing in
mind that Hastings & Donovan’s article («International initiatives:
introduction and overview»), where this approach was suggested, is also from
2002, and that Alan Andreasen’s book (Social
Marketing in the 21st Century), where this enlarged perspective has been
developed and diffused, is from 2006, one has to recognize a modest but
pioneering position in my article.
In any
case, there was the conceptual basis on which social marketing is still seen
today in this book: an approach and a methodology that, aiming for the
betterment of people’s social behaviour, articulate specific interventions with
a wider policy context that honestly and effectively aim for citizens’ improved
wellbeing.
Seeking to
enlarge knowledge beyond the academy, it was with great pleasure I developed a
social marketing guide (Santos et al., 2004) for the CEBI Foundation – a
foundation for community development – and for the EQUAL project (the European
Union’s initiative for tackling discrimination and disadvantage in the labour
market) with the cooperation of young researchers and social activists from
that institution. Published in 2004 and republished in 2012, I suppose this
guide, the first of its kind in our language, is still a useful instrument for
Portuguese-speaking users. It is available online for free download at the Marketing Social Portugal Website (www.marketingsocialportugal.net),
which I have created and still coordinate for the free diffusion of social
marketing related documents and links. During all these years, I have seen with
joy the rise of some Portuguese researchers involved in social marketing and
the development of this area all over the world, as important recommendations
from institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control, have stressed. Imagine my happiness when, in 2012, the
first-ever European Social Marketing Conference was held in Lisbon!
This means
the present book goes hand in hand with a long and devoted life experience
about these subjects, the profound dream of having in my country a fairer and
more fraternal and prosperous society centred on the effective betterment of
people’s lives and seeking an open knowledge of new approaches and
methodologies which contribute to that.
Thus the
starting point for these pages is the need to understand how in other
countries, social marketing national interventions inserted in their public
policy have developed. This book reveals the methodological reasons why the
British case was chosen and what led to the formulation of a cognitive
hypothesis to explain its origin and development. Moreover, it is with a
pleasant internationalist feeling that I have done a study as a Portuguese
based in England and used a French-origin methodology – the public policy frame
of reference (référentiel) according
to the so-called Grenoble school.
The truth
is that after that talk at the Keble College dining hall in 2007, many doors
opened for me in British institutions and I was able to participate in numerous
meetings, real interventions, have access to documents and perform several
interviews. It has been both a lesson and an enormous pleasure to share the
kindness, transparency and openness owned by the best of the British spirit.
That was the place where this book was born.
Part I
states the methodological fundaments of the study, situates the field from
which it was generated, puts the main issue to be addressed and advances a
hypothesis to explore and an explanatory theory that aims to sustain it, which
will be tested according to the case study research method (Yin, 1984), based
on the British one considered as crucial.
Part II
sets out the political grounds for social marketing and formulates a political
conception of this discipline on the basis of freedom and democracy, and a
government accountable to citizens, practicing a “piecemeal social
engineering”, in Karl Popper’s own words, and adopting the concepts and
criteria of pragmatism.
My own
statement about social marketing is the main content of Part III, based on the
own theory and practice of marketing, as well as on the conceptual evolution of
social marketing and its wider role, where a downstream approach is combined
with an upstream one, addressing the structural and social factors, depending
on their political, social and economic decision makers and agents. I know that
many of the issues addressed in Part III have already been mentioned by other
authors, but my purpose was to create a reasoning line and a comprehensive way
for this book’s readers.
Parts I, II
and III go hand in hand as a mixed framework for the focus of our study. Part
IV, the core of this book, describes and analyses with appropriate detail the
data resulting from the study of the British national policy on social
marketing according to our explanatory theory.
Finally,
Part V assesses the initial hypothesis in the light of the findings of the case
study research, formulating a national policy on social marketing framework,
addressing their potential and limitations, taking into account the inherent
policy transfer problems and implementation, and indicating some possible lines
of research for the development of this study.
In the
Appendices we gather a few documents related with the British national policy
on social marketing. It is important that all the statements, documents and
references we present, can enable independent judgments about this study,
according to the criteria of validity and replication, as well as support the
knowledge and policy transfer to any other implementation process of a national
policy on social marketing. May this work be useful for those who want to
develop social marketing in their own countries, communities and lives. I
wish them well.
C.O.S.
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