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According to the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, we cook to show we are civilised. So the rise of the Superchef must say something about how much we value the idea of civilisation. Whether on television, web, books or gadgets, they inspire us to see the preparation and presentation of food not just as a necessary chore, but a potential pleasure and focus for friendship, family life and fun.

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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Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

I was struck by the claim that one in five parents in the Money Programme ‘Cost of Kids’ survey admitted to buying new gadgets after pressure from their children, with much of the resulting expenditure ending up on credit cards. The example was consumer electronics companies recruiting our kids to get us to buy gadgets that we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, and only they know how to work. But more worrying is the evidence that pester power, or the ‘nag factor’ as it’s known in America, could be costing us more than money. By encouraging them to ask for the wrong kind of food and drink it’s costing some of our children their health.

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.

Subscribe to Terry O'Sullivan's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

Animals are like people, only nicer. Or so it would seem in the annals of British advertising, where animals have featured in some of the industry's longest-running and most famous campaigns. What did you sleep on last night? Did the unlikely combination of a hippo and a duck haunt your dreams at any point?

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