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Social Marketing as Social Control 157

climate change, Janette Webb (2012) argues that the typical social market-
ing approaches amount to little more than incremental social change be-
cause they tend to focus on individual preferences and behavior. When
confronted with social problems—in this case, the fouling of the climate
by human beings through their use of fossil fuels—the tendency is to psy-
chologize such problems and emphasize behavior change or modification.
This would seem to make sense on some level, since it is, after all, indi-
vidual human beings who carry out plans and make choices among the
options before them. The “social” in social marketing, then, merely points
to the ideal state that would be reached assuming individuals in targeted
populations could be made to adopt or refrain from the activities associ-
ated with the program. That is, a valued collective goal could be reached if
only enough people within the targeted population could be reached and
could be convinced to adopt the innovation.
Indeed, throughout its history, marketing has been entwined with as-
sumptions about both “psychological man” and “subconscious man,” in-
formed by Freud. The earliest market research, from the 1920s forward,
was heavily influenced by the writings of behavioral psychologist John B.
Watson (Samuel, 2010). Later, when it became obvious that the attempt to
link attitudes to actual behavior was somewhat imperfect and that predic-
tions of consumer or customer choice were not meeting the scientific gold
standard of statistical tests yielding robust r-squareds above, say, .70, it
became fashionable to go back to Freud to uncover the deep or latent as-
pects of the black box of the mind residing beneath what was measurable
at the level of personality (Chriss, 1999). Indeed, by the 1940s and 1950s,
both marketing and social work had taken this clinical, Freudian approach
to unlocking what resided in the deep, dark recesses of the unconscious.
This was consistent with a general therapeutization of American society on
the way to the 1960s, marked by such indicators as the increased use of
therapeutic approaches in prison (i.e., the rehabilitative ideal of indetermi-
nate sentencing), the exploration of mind-expanding or -altering activities
and drugs (e.g., the rise in the use of experimental and hallucinogenic
drugs in the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, new electronic sounds and
hypnotic beats in rock music, visual effects such as black lights, explora-
tions into Eastern mysticism), and the discovery of subliminal advertising
in marketing and motivational research.
But is it really efficient to start with the assumption of the atomistic,
psychologistic, idiosyncratic individual as carrier of a bundle of need-dis-
positions who confronts the world and makes behavioral choices on a
case-by-case basis? The thought is that, if we understood individual peo-
ple and their psyches well enough, we could direct those atomistic