Page 169 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Marketing as Social Control 161

what sort of interventions (primary, secondary, tertiary, or unintended
quaternary) would be best suited to reaching the ameliorative goals of the
program. Social marketing is seen as a key tool in this work, because sur-
veillance is intrusive by its very nature, and people are resistant to inter-
ventions they deem to be forced upon them. Indeed, one of the major
criticisms of public health interventions guided by the logic of social mar-
keting is that their combination produces something akin to a “nanny
state,” where self-proclaimed experts, acting on behalf of the government,
intervene in ever more areas of daily life while justifying their actions by
informing the common folk, “Trust us, we are doing this for your own
good” (French, 2009; Turner, 2003).
Yet, for all the good that public health and social marketing proponents
seek to do for society at large, the great majority of them never come to
grips with the blatant social control functions of the entire enterprise.
They seem afraid or reluctant to admit that, at heart, social marketing is
indeed social control. Consider the definition of social marketing offered
by Wymer (2010, p. 99), which is “the design, implementation, and con-
trol of programs seeking to increase the acceptability of a social idea or
practice in a target group.” Here, control is embedded in the very defini-
tion of social marketing (see Chapter 2 of this volume). Yet, in carrying out
the designs of social marketing, its practitioners tend to gloss over the
controlling or coercive aspects of the enterprise.
To soften the overtly controlling and steering aspects of the administra-
tive functions of government, including public health administration, so-
cial marketing has been used as a way of attempting to frame a public
discourse (or ideology) aimed at getting people to believe that the pro-
posed changes are good for them and that they are not merely the nefari-
ous or misguided ramblings of Big Brother bureaucrats. There are many
concepts and undertakings allied to the project of social marketing on
behalf of public health, including new ideas concerning the “imperatives”
of health and wellness as argued by Lupton (1995) and newer policies in
behavioral economics that are aimed at “nudging” a reluctant public to-
ward healthy lifestyles and accepting health promotion as a public good in
and of itself (Brown, 2012; Raphael, 2000; Rothschild, 1999).
Ironically, as Lupton (1995) has pointed out, the concern over govern-
ment steering of the imperatives of health and wellness for all can be
articulated from either the political left or the political right. From the
political right, government meddling in the private affairs of citizens
regarding their health interferes with the decisions citizens should be
making in consultation with their doctors about their own health needs
and concerns. From the political left, there is concern over the continuing