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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.

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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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In spite of the growth of online shopping, the High Street is still a pretty dynamic place. In this blog I want to talk about some of the ways in which marketing theory tries to explain the way in which retail outlets come and go.

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.

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

The renaissance of St Trinians, a prime example of a ‘retro’ brand, reminds us that cinema knows a thing or two about marketing. Why go to the trouble, expense and risk of developing a new product when you can extend the life of a tried and tested offering by giving it a contemporary spin (provided here by the presence of Messrs Firth and Everett)? With audiences conditioned to expect big-name actors, plush production values, and expensive special effects, film backers need deep pockets and a steady nerve. No wonder that producers are so fond of the familiar – whether as remakes (often of what were remakes in the first place), or of seemingly inexhaustible franchises such as Bond, Carry On or St Trinians.

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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