Page 276 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

252 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

particular retail outlets can locate; the latter argument is used to justify
either subsidies or public works.
The information perspective also has socioeconomic and marketing
threads. The socioeconomic thread reflects concerns over the conse-
quences to young people whose environments provide mainly negative
role models and social reinforcement. The marketing thread was nicely
summarized by Winett and Wallack (1996, p. 179). They noted that “given
the seemingly insurmountable and ubiquitous cues influencing individu-
als to maintain unhealthy habits,” traditional educational campaigns will
almost always fail. Recent advances in information technology have only
served to amplify this argument. For example, the proliferation of compu-
ter games featuring children’s snacks is viewed as just the latest example of
how marketing communications strongly influence young people to en-
gage in unhealthy behaviors (Ambinder, 2010). The critical point is that
marketing communications are viewed as having an overwhelming influ-
ence on individual beliefs and preferences. This view obviously supports
restrictions on marketing communications.
Simply identifying sources and drawing direct links to potential public
policies understates the true importance of the social construction per-
spective. This perspective makes the case that individual choice is an illu-
sion because the environmental context is so heavily shaped by corporate
marketing efforts. We do not mean to suggest that the social construction
view—its extreme form, in particular—has become accepted wisdom. The
debate, often cast in terms of the importance or relevance of personal re-
sponsibility, rages. Our point is that one of its major pillars is the preva-
lence and presumed power of marketing practices. Over time, the social
construction view has become more widely accepted and thus has led to
support for upstream remedies.
To conclude, powerful forces underlie the trend toward upstream rem-
edies. The relevance of these trends to the question of why people support
coercive remedies is (at least) twofold. A commonality of many models of
the public policy process is that intellectual ideas play an important role,
even though most voters are only vaguely cognizant of their existence, and
intellectual ideas are created and promoted by agents and organizations. In
the current political environment, there are many centers, institutes, and
organizations that are funded by companies seeking to influence public
policy by influencing the intellectual discourse. At a more concrete level,
the importance, relevance, and applicability of intellectual ideas to a spe-
cific policy is influenced by how abstract dimensions are articulated as
contributing to the problem’s existence, who bears the costs of the prob-
lem, and the policy-specific solution. For example, support for remedies