Monday 10 June 2019

A great honour, a great joy

My fellows from the European Social Marketing Association conferred me the Outstanding Achievement Award for Social Marketing, at the World Social Marketing Conference 2019, in Edinburgh, 4 June. What a surprise! 

Thank you my dear fellows. I have dedicated a great part of my academic life to this contribution to people's wellbeing. It was a pleasure and a great honour. 
Dr. Nadina Luca, ESMA board member, handed me the trophy, and the Gala Dinner was presented by Mark Beaumont, a Scottish national hero, another great pleasure for me, as I am a true Scotland's lover. As a guest member of the St. Andrew's Society in Lisbon, I even put my kilt for the dinner.
On my thanksgiving speech I have remembered the first time I met Jeff French, at the Keble College's dining room, in Oxford, at the very beginning of the British national policy on social marketing, and since then how I have his support for a great part of my work. I thank him a lot.
For this Conference I have presented a Social Marketing Political Manifesto, trying to draw atention to several actual challenges in this field, and it was also with great pleasure that I have received many words of support from several fellows, including Jeff French and Sally Dibb, in the closing session.





Here is its text:

A Social Marketing Political Manifesto

There are spectres haunting social marketing – spectres that affect human rights and the human condition. Since Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman published their ever-remembered article, time and life did not stop. Technological innovation and the way it has been used and misused represents a major threat to human freedom, by abusively conditioning people's behaviours, and affecting social marketing, and all behaviour change fields. Simultaneously, the political environment in which social marketing was born has changed a lot for the worse. After democracy had a remarkable global run, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world has come to a halt everywhere we can see the rise of populism, the arrogance of authoritarian regimes, and the rapid growth of rising inequality, welfare-state cutbacks, greater insecurity for the working and middle classes, and the spread of economic and social risk. One cannot also forget the waves and waves of politicians who do not know, do not pay attention, or are even interested in citizens’ demands and concerns, including the rise of unelected technocracies. In view of this, social marketing must reaffirm its political and ideological groundings.
Social marketing was born in the context of the fight for civil rights in the US, and the need to tackle huge health challenges in the developing world. It was surrounded by the international uproar against Vietnam War, the student’s uprising that proliferated throughout numerous developed countries, and ensuing deep cultural changes that flowed from this. Its response came from a persistent tradition of the Twentieth-Century progressive liberalism. Philip Kotler has emphasized this in his more recent interviews and books, reaffirming the need for social marketing to stick with its progressive origins.
The essential proposition is that social marketing’s most intrinsic concepts are alien to illegitimate authoritarianisms, any reduction in citizens’ rights and freedoms, and manipulation by governments hostile to the people’s wellbeing. We are not «hired guns» at the service of any arbitrary power. We are not value free. There is a political responsibility intrinsic to social marketing that results from its core concepts.
Since its beginning social marketing has been applied in countries with very distinct political regimes, including non-democratic ones in low, middle and high income countries. But social marketing is defined by placing a great deal of emphasis on the dignity to self-determination of the individual, which presupposes a fundamental respect for freedom fully materialized in democratic societies. Social marketing therefore is a child of and instrument of democracy.
Freedom and democracy are our roots. In any of its forms (nudge, hug, smack, or shove policies, using The Exchange Matrix, by Jeff French, 2011), social marketing must preserve its democratic principles of free citizens’ choice, or democratic mandated collective action to promote health, social, and environmental wellbeing. But social marketing is not a «neoliberal experiment». Furthermore, the so called «neoliberalism», as Noam Chomsky wrote (1999), is not new and is not liberal. Their basic assumptions are far from those that have animated the liberal tradition since the Enlightment. «Neoliberalism» is a mix of illiberal libertarianism and conservatism that seeks to undermine collective state directed action, with consequential increases in social inequality.
In those countries, as the UK, that developed national policies on social marketing in public health, our field was not a «neoliberal experiment».  It was a contribution of academics and public officers based on the 1946 World Health Organization’s recommendations, in which WHO proposed that health should be considered and promoted in all its socio-economical dimensions, involving, and engaging individuals, environmental factors, and social conditions.
The use of social marketing as part of this process can above all contribute to ensuring that social policy and attempts to improve the human condition are based on a sound understanding of citizens, their lives, and the communities they are part of. Social marketing also seeks collectively to ensure that people agree when individual freedoms should be curtailed for the collective good. Social marketing was, and is a systematic tool for promoting public and social freedom, and social good, founded on true concerns about human wellbeing and respect for citizens. For a' that an' a' that, so be it.

Edinburgh, June 3, 2019

Carlos Oliveira Santos
Ph.D, Institute for Public and Social Policy
Lisbon University Institute, Portugal

Carlos Oliveira Santos
can be contacted at costerra1953@gmail.com

This Manifesto was presented and discussed
at the World Social Marketing Conference 2019,
Edinburgh, UK

Acknowledgements:
Jeff French, Lynne Eagle,
Marco Morato, Giuseppe Fattori