Page 161 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Marketing as Social Control 153

namely, that any marketing design is always geared toward developing
“the right product backed by the right promotion and put in the right place
2
at the right price” (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971, p. 7). It is, in a nutshell, the
application of business marketing principles to effect some desired social
change. Even so, the authors are also cognizant that many citizens might
be resentful of government administrative agencies, especially the public
health wing, employing elements of public opinion surveying and busi-
ness marketing to “sell” desired health outcomes. The concern is that the
public may come to view the governmental project of ameliorating a broad
(and growing) range of social pathologies as manipulative and outright
social control, the culmination of Orwell’s 1984.
Notice that any use of influence, persuasion, advertising, or promotion
to get people to do something new or different is always a type of social
control, yet social control is so pervasive that it is limiting to view it always
or primarily through the dystopian lens of a government acting as a Big
Brother seeking total domination of a hapless citizenry. Nevertheless, this
particular element of social marketing, as used at the behest of govern-
ments seeking to soften the blow of the cost or invasiveness of health in-
terventions, is a crucial aspect of the larger discussion of such issues
addressed in this handbook. To discuss social marketing as social control
within the context of health promotion, we must first develop a more nu-
anced approach to the concept of social control.

Social Control: Informal, Legal, and Medical

Beyond the condition of the archaic savage horde, human society is about
association, of living together with other human beings. The primordial
basis upon which human association developed was blood—that is, the
bonding together of individuals through kinship ties and obligations.
Later, with the transition from endogamy to exogamy—the latter being the
rule that one should seek procreative partners outside the immediate
clan—human associations started expanding outward toward more dis-
tant people and groups (such as in the totemic system where blood ties
and ancestry played a less central role; see Frazer, 1910; Durkheim,
1912/1961). In the most primitive stage of existence, isolated families
were self-enclosed units that engaged in little interaction with people out-
side their immediate group. Tarde (1903) provides clarity on this transi-
tion from solitary and limited human associations based on blood and
direct rule (usually by male heads after the emergence of patriarchy or
androcracy; see Chriss, 2006; Ward, 1883) to more complex human
formations: