Collins English Dictionary’s listing of ‘doing a Delia’ (meaning to cook ‘properly’) demonstrates just how engrained the Superchef has become in contemporary British culture. However much we love take-aways and convenience foods, our fascination with these gastronomic gurus reveals a profound desire to connect with each other via the kitchen.

The link between cooking and our desire to be civilised is not just about throwing chic dinner parties, of course. Food is a deeply political issue, raising all sorts of moral and ethical questions. It’s interesting to note how several celebrity chefs have stepped out of the kitchen and on to the campaign trail to back causes from animal welfare to healthy eating.

Consider Jamie Oliver, whose 2005 efforts on behalf of the nation’s school-dinner eaters (however reluctant some of them might have been!) prompted pledges by the UK Government to invest in the quality of school food. More recently he has campaigned to spread basic cooking skills amongst the population. The better we are at cooking, the more choices we have about what we eat – which must be a good thing if we want to move towards healthier or more sustainable diets.

Food is a deeply political issue, raising all sorts of moral and ethical questions

Campaigning and social marketing (i.e. using marketing techniques to further socially desirable objectives) are important areas of teaching and research at the Open University Business School and our partner organisation the Institute for Social Marketing. I thought it would be instructive in this blog to analyse Jamie Oliver’s work in the light of some of the theory we profess.

For example, the Campaign Diamond (Baguley, 2007) is a simple model which can be used by organisations and individuals to gauge how likely a campaign is to succeed before they commit valuable time and resources to going public with it. The model depicts the ‘space’ available for an effective campaign as dependent on four ‘facets’ of a diamond. A balanced profile across each facet is a good indication that your campaign will fly.

The first facet is the problem underlying the campaign. This has to be something significant you can articulate clearly and unambiguously, or you risk demotivating distortion as the campaign develops. For example, some critics accused Jamie Oliver of selectively stereotyping ‘unhealthy eaters’ in his recent campaign.He’s hit back that he was presenting a balanced snapshot of a the issue of poor diet which affects people from all sorts of backgrounds, and that perhaps his detractors just don’t want to admit it. This kind of single-minded focus on a problem can appear simplistic, but has the long-term benefit of maintaining clarity of message.

Jamie Oliver tasting a cocktail.
[image © copyright BBC]

The second facet is social authorisation. This is to do with judging the zeitgeist relative to a particular issue. Mounting concerns about the future health of the nation because of diets high in fat, salt and sugar (mainstays of the processed food of which the UK is disproportionately fond) have led to public anxiety about nutrition. Social authorisation is essential to a campaign’s credibility with news media and decision makers. The political impact of the school dinners crusade is testimony to Jamie Oliver’s good judgement in this respect.

The third facet is operational capacity. This means the ability to convert the enthusiasm generated by the campaign into action. It’s hardly worth firing people up about an issue if you then can’t give them the opportunity to do something about it. Here Jamie Oliver scores a blinder – harnessing the power of social networking so that those reached by his recent campaign share their cooking skills with others. The internet is a powerful tool in this respect, and has the further advantage of popularity with groups that more staid calls to action might not reach.

The final facet of the diamond is the opportunity for social value. This boils down to how big a difference you think the campaign will make. It helps to be as sure as you can about what a campaign will achieve before you launch it, and to have an evaluation method in place in advance so you can see if and when it’s worked. This is where many worthy initiatives come unstuck.

On the other hand, the precise effect of ventures such as Jamie Oliver’s cooking campaign must be hard to calculate in advance simply because of the potential numbers involved. It may be that the most lasting impact lies beyond the relatively straightforward metrics of participation or media coverage in long-term political effects (witness the Essex Superchef’s influential audience with the Commons Health Select Committee in November 2008).

There’s a lot to be learned from these examples, even for those of us without access to the impressive resources which Jamie Oliver has exploited so imaginatively. Articulating a compelling case, making sure it resonates with people, having systems in place which can convert sympathy into action, and being clear about what you are trying to achieve, are as important to someone campaigning for a new zebra crossing as they are to a Superchef bent on changing the nation’s eating habits.

Courses

• Certificate in accounting
• Marketing in a complex world
• Innovation: designing for a sustainable future

 Take it further

• Watch Greg Wallace in Cut prices, cut corners?
• Food ethics
• Does it cost too much to be green?

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

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Recent years have seen some very big names all but disappear. Others have had to re-invent themselves in tune with the times. And yet more have apparently popped up from nowhere to offer shoppers an experience they never realised they needed until they walked in off the pavement. Think of chains like Lush, whose perfumed presence hits the nostrils at a range of 100 metres. Or Urban Outfitters with its quirky combination of houseware and boho fashion. Or the renaissance of destination stores like Harvey Nicks and Selfridges in Birmingham’s Bull Ring. You certainly won’t get that kind of shopping experience on the internet. All of these stores have prospered by producing something new that strikes a chord with shoppers. In another part of the market, the hard discounters Aldi, Lidl and Netto have come from unglamorous beginnings to a position where they are giving the big grocers a run for their money.

Bags of groceries.
[Image © copyright Photos.com]

Marketing experts have puzzled for years about what, if anything, drives these changes in the retail landscape. One of the most famous theories, broached by the American scholar Stan Hollander as far back as 1960, is the Wheel of Retailing. This argues that successful new stores start off by piling high and selling cheap.

The ones that thrive expand rapidly – but on perilously thin profit margins. The inevitable next step is to move up-market and court wealthier customers with higher quality, but more expensive merchandise. However, the operating costs this ushers in can leave established stores exposed to new competitors, keen to grab the customers they've left behind. According to this model of retail development, shops are on a predictable merry-go-round of discounting to win customers, then getting choosier about their clientele, and finally losing ground to upstarts keen to steal their early success.

This is a plausible theory in many respects. You can see how it might fit Aldi's recent launch of a premium range of products. But even Hollander, its originator, wasn't entirely happy with it and just a few years later he came up with another memorable image to explain retail comings and goings – the concertina model. According to this, the main action on the High Street swings between specialist stores offering a limited range of goods in great depth, and general stores with a wide range of goods but less choice. In this image, the dominant mode of retailing expands and contracts, like an economic squeezebox.

If your products are right for the market, and people can't get them anywhere else, they will come

Just as in the Wheel of Retailing, no store can afford to stand still. So specialists yearn to expand into wider product ranges, and generalists decide to refocus on key lines to free the cash they have tied up in stock. Casualties occur either way, as shops which have grown big on a narrow path lose their way by injudicious expansion, and vice versa.

The latest big idea to explain changes in the retail landscape is called 'The Big Middle'. Dreamt up in 2005 by a group of American researchers working with a senior manager at Wal-Mart, this sounds like it might have something to do with spending too long at the deli counter. But it's another attractively simple concept. Like the Wheel of Retailing it sees low prices as one route to success for new retailers. But at the other end of the scale it holds innovation to be an equally successful alternative, price notwithstanding. If your products are right for the market, and people can't get them anywhere else, they will come.

Think about some of the hot new apparel and technology retailers as examples of this. In common with the Wheel and the Concertina, the Big Middle holds that you can't stand still in retailing. Sooner or later both discounters and innovators have to move closer to the middle market just to keep growing and cover the rising fixed costs that expansion entails. This means raising prices to boost profitability and broadening product range to appeal to more customers. So by a natural process they all become more or less the same kind of successful store..

So the likely future for the Aldis of this world is to become ever more like the established supermarkets. Ironically, the big chains, in turn, seem determined to parade their own discounting credentials ever more stridently before us. Boring perhaps, but good news for the economically-challenged shopper – until the next big thing in retailing comes along.

Listen to this blog post on our Money & Management podcast.

Weblinks

• Brand vision
• Consumer choice
• The importance of brands
• Keeping customers

Courses

• Marketing and society
• Marketing in a complex world

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

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But given their (usually) assured performances as marketers (not only of their own films but via the ‘product placement’ strategies that are now an important part of film finance), it’s always struck me as odd that so few producers make films actually dramatising the lives of marketing folk. Alongside cinema’s disproportionate representation of criminals, police officers, detectives, military personnel and cowboys, we meet plenty of lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers and even the occasional university lecturer on the silver screen. All of these callings have, of course, the potential for drama and human interaction on which film depends – but so have jobs like marketing, sales and advertising. After all, as I remember being told by my first marketing director, “it’s a people business”. ”Like cannibalism”, he added after a short pause.

When films do, occasionally, portray the marketing industry they tend to share this cynicism.  A good example would be Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (which came out in 1989, at the end of a particularly excessive decade for the industry). It starts with Dennis Bagley (Richard E Grant) holding forth about the ‘average housewife’ in a smokey advertising strategy meeting. His barrage of statistics reduces her to the condition of a puppet jerked profitably on advertising’s strings of desire and guilt, from diets to high-calorie ‘treats’ and back again.

Success in selling has brought Bagley a Chelsea tractor, a country pile and a trophy wife. But success comes at a price – and panic at not being able to think up a new campaign for pimple cream drives him over the edge. In a road-to-Damascus reversal, he resigns, vowing to expose the lies of advertising. Through the miracle of cinema, the stress-related boil he has developed becomes a spokes-pustule for all that he now opposes. The rest of the film recounts the ensuing power struggle – with results that are less than flattering for the industry.

The perils of the creative life also feature in a film released the following year, Tony Bill’s Crazy People (1990). This is a one-joke effort, relying on Dudley Moore as Emory, a creatively-blocked copywriter whose nervous breakdown inspires him to tell the truth in each ad, rather than relying on the standard repertoire of euphemism and puff. He gets carted off to an asylum, while his ads accidentally escape into the media. They cause a sensation rather than the expected furore, and Emory’s career is relaunched (although he insists on recruiting his fellow-inmates as a creative resource). By now he’s in love with one of them – played by the delectable Daryl Hannah, whose only concession to madness appears to be a slightly tousled hair look. (Rather unfairly, I think, the other inhabitants of the institution are made to look like stock characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Their collection of ‘honest advertising’ runs from extolling the safety of ‘boxy’ cars to the competitive advantage of Japanese electronics companies whose workers are closer to the circuit boards than their taller Caucasian rivals. Trends in political correctness apart, I wonder if the film could ever have been made today in view of the reverence with which major corporations now venerate their brands.

My third and final exhibit from the gallery of cinema’s depiction of advertising comes from ten years later and is the only one by a female director, Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want (2000). Like Crazy People the film is a romantic comedy, a vehicle for Mel Gibson who plays the dishy but heartless Nick Marshall, yet another advertising creative. The focus of the film this time, however, is not the moral shortcomings of advertising, but the way it represents and reproduces society – specifically the rise of female economic power.

Nick is the ultimate sexist – a ladies’ man who has risen to the top of his profession on a masculine wave of advertising cars, power tools and sports utility vehicles to other guys. He only gets blocked when his agency hires a female creative director, Darcy Maguire (Helen Hunt) over his head and he is challenged to come up with some ideas for the female-oriented products and services which are now making the running in the market. But, as I mentioned, this is a romcom, and a brief electrocution gives Nick the power to read women’s minds. This gives him insight into the female consumer psyche in general, and instant access to his rival Darcy’s thoughts in particular. He thus steals the credit for saving the agency with a successful pitch for a major women’s sportswear account – but when Darcy gets fired for non-delivery, he owns up (by now, of course, in love with her) and all ends happily.

Each of these films takes a different slant on advertising ranging from depicting it as a pernicious cultural influence to a barometer of social change. But none of them are exactly in the first rank of their genre, interesting and amusing as all of them manage to be in parts. Could it be that there is something a little embarrassing for screenwriters and directors in taking the wraps off advertising as subject matter, given their own reliance as a profession on making commercials to finance more intrinsically ‘artistic’ ventures?

Find out more

• Film and society - from Love On The Dole to My Beautiful Laundrette, film has reflected and engaged the values of our culture
• Join the discussion - can films ever accurately reflect society?
• The revival of Ealing Studios - The Money Programme follows the makers of the St Trinian's remake, as they try to put Ealing back on the map
• Creative Arts Marketing, 2^nd Edition
  Elizabeth Hill, Terry O’Sullivan, and Catherine O'Sullivan, published by Butterworth-Heinemann
• Unit 6: Marketing Communications
  B825 Marketing in a Complex World
  OU Business School, Milton Keynes.

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

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From the forum - "the trick to keeping costs down is to think differently and keep things natural"

Marketing first woke up to children in the middle of the 20th century, particularly their power to influence adult purchasing. It began to aim products directly at them rather than having them make do with modified versions of adult products. In many ways this has been a good thing. Taking account of children’s needs in designing products such as holidays, cars or clothing makes a lot of sense. But in other areas, such as fizzy drinks, pre-sweetened cereals and fast food, the effect has been to promote fun and taste well beyond any sense of nutritional value. The vast majority of the food advertising seen by children is for such high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) foods. Any parent who wants to do the best for their children’s dietary habits has a struggle on their hands as a result.

Advertisers deny deliberately setting parents at odds with their children. Industry codes of practice explicitly forbid such tactics, and pundits argue that pestering has much more to do with age than ads. But there is plenty of evidence from consumer research that parents are uncomfortably aware of ceding to demands stimulated by child-directed advertising. One recent study in Sweden revealed that parents actively avoided supermarket shopping accompanied by their children because of the stress it caused. And a widely-used UK market research report on marketing to children underlines the importance of ‘influenced purchasing’.

Opponents in the pester power debate are not shy of throwing contradictory research findings at each other to support their respective positions. But how good is the evidence, and which way does it point? To answer this question OU Business School and our partners in the Institute of Social Marketing recently reviewed a selection of key research articles evaluating the effect of food promotion on children’s attempts to influence purchasing by adults. We only looked at studies meeting strict quality and relevance criteria. They covered children in different parts of the world (US, UK, Saudi Arabia and India), and used a variety of methodologies. Yet they all concurred that food promotion does indeed stimulate demands from children for HFSS foods, increasing conflict in the supermarket aisles and leading in many cases to exasperated expenditure on less healthy products.

The food advertising industry, pointing to its record of self-regulation in the UK, claims that tightening further the rules on advertising to children is disproportionate. It argues that advertising is only one of a number of factors guiding what children want to eat, and that its effect is negligible compared to, say, the influence of parents, schools or peers. But even if advertising on its own only accounted for 2% of the variation in children’s food choice and consequent obesity (as has been suggested by some researchers), the cumulative effect will leave a significant number with health problems.

Against this kind of controversy, Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, has spent a year consulting on a number of different options to tighten up regulation. On 22nd February 2007 it issued new rules banning HFSS food ads from programming likely to be popular with under 16s by the end of the year. While this looks like good news for any harassed parents out there, it has been greeted with dismay by health campaigners for not going far enough (many wanted a total ban on such ads pre 9pm). Industry bodies are not happy either, criticising the definitional criteria for HFSS foods as inconsistent. Furthermore, Ofcom’s announcement included a commitment to reviewing the effectiveness and scope of the new arrangements in autumn 2008, which seems rather early in the day to be looking for conclusive results. You may be sure that this controversy will not be over till the, er, fat lady sings.

Further reading

• The price of parenthood – having children brings many changes
• Join the discussion – how does the cost of children affect your view of having kids?
• The cost of kids – the Money Programme investigates the rising price of parenthood 
• ‘Food Advertising, Pester Power, and Its Effects’ in International Journal of Advertising, November 2006
• Television Advertising of Food and Drink Products to Children published by Ofcom

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

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Think about what you had for breakfast this morning. Did cereal-toting tigers, honey monsters or tea-swilling chimps have anything to do with it? How about what you have in your bathroom. Does an adorable Labrador puppy spring to mind?

Brand spokescreatures such as these make an instant emotional connection with us. A bit like pets, they offer warm, uncomplicated relationships in a world too full of confusion and hostility. And it's not just the British who have a predilection for things four-legged. Animal ads seem to tap into an international empathy with the cuddly kingdom.

In Canada, for example, mobile phone advertising is dominated by dogs, lizards and beavers. Frank and Gordon (the animatronic beavers in that list) front Bell Canada's cell phone campaign, representing brand attributes of cuteness and mobility. Wander into one of their high-street shops and you can even have your photo taken with a stuffed version of the toothy twosome, perhaps on your new camera phone.

More cynically, one can see the economic advantages of animals for advertisers themselves. They don't answer back, they are non-unionised, and they arguably have a more universal appeal to today's global marketplace than humans from a particular ethnic or demographic mould. They are a great way of surrounding a brand with associations other than how much it's costing us.

Best of all are animated animals, whether as cartoons or increasingly life-like animatronic creations. These get round the proverbial difficulties of working with "animals and children", as well as neatly removing any question of exploitation.

With changing attitudes to animal rights and a keener sense of the importance of animal welfare, avoiding the charge of exploitation is becoming increasingly important for advertisers. A number of companies in the UK have stopped using great apes in advertising (including Halfords, Grolsch, and perhaps most famously PG Tips).

In the Republic of Ireland only last year the mobile phone operator Meteor prompted protests from animal protection groups over the use of an orang-utan called Harry in its advertising. Earlier in 2005 the AA ruled out future use of captive wild animals in its advertising following similar protests about its use of an elephant.

Such protests are connected with more than just a simple concern for animal welfare, however. They may be early warnings of a shift in popular opinion which might see the use of animals in advertising as undignified, in spite of its popularity until now.

There is a growing sense in which humans are beginning to consider themselves as no different from any other animals. Many contemporary philosophers define personhood on the grounds of an organism's consciousness of being alive rather than its being human.

Influential ethicists such as Peter Singer have revived the idea of utilitarianism on a global scale, arguing that we need to weigh our rights as humans with the claims of other living beings when we make moral decisions. It takes a while for this kind of thinking to filter through to the level of marketing, and it's open to all sorts of objections. However, a similar kind of philosophical revolution has had a profound impact on attitudes to green issues, which we now take for granted in marketing and elsewhere.

One of the first ways in which the use of animals in advertising may change in response to this trend is that advertisers will stop patronising animals by giving them cute human characteristics, and instead recognise the animal-like features of humans.

This may explain the current advertising campaign by (yet another) mobile phone operator in the UK, where customers are split into different kinds of animals depending on what they're looking for (and put on different tariffs accordingly). Dolphins are sociable creatures who use their phones to facilitate and organise their interactions with others, canaries like nothing better than chirping away on their mobiles, racoons are highly instrumental, and panthers are sleek, sophisticated hunters prowling the microwaves for information and entertainment.

The animals are represented in the ads not by real creatures, nor by even vaguely life-like animatronics, but by symbolic representations such as balloons in the mobile phone operator's house colour. Not only does that banish any suggestion of exploiting real animals, it also cloaks the human assumption of animal identities with a sense of innocent celebration and fun. Like people, only nicer.

Further reading

• Marketing in a Complex World
• Philosophy and the Human Situation
• How are we to live? Ethics in an age of self-interest by Peter Singer

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

Subscribe to Terry O'Sullivan's posts