Critical social marketing: towards emancipation?

Introduction

In this editorial, critical review, and research agenda for this special section of the Journal of Marketing Management on ‘Critical Social Marketing: Towards Emancipation’, we argue that the need for critically informed approaches to pro-social behaviour and social change is ever more important. Now more than ever the world faces many ‘wicked problems’ – social problems that are complicated, multi-faceted, intractable, and can be difficult or even impossible to solve due to their complexity, incomplete knowledge about their causes and solutions, contradictory and changing perspectives, flux over time, and difficulties in changing the social systems and relations that underpin them (Rittel & Webber, 1973). The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic continues to affect millions of lives, and climate disaster is becoming increasingly evident across the globe.

War rages in Ukraine and in other countries including Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. Other important social problems include non-communicable diseases (World Health Organization 2021a), rising economic, social and health inequalities (Piketty, 2014; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2020), racism (Grier & Poole, 2020) religious intolerance (Research Center, 2021), gender inequality (World Economic Forum, 2021), workplace bullying (Einarsen et al., 2020), and problem gambling (Reith et al., 2019). Political extremism and the erosion of democratic principles (Kotler, 2016) also continue to present major challenges. These complex problems represent the context for social change activities designed to enable us all to live better lives. They represent a context for social marketing focused on highlighting how marketing can support individual human, collective and cultural rights, and protect flora, fauna, people, and the planet through behaviour and social change.

This special section focusing on Critical Social Marketing (CSM) is published at a point in history where people are still affected by the confluence of social problems that have been triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. These have furthered a range of inequalities and threatened decades of improvements to living standards (United Nations, 2021a). The health impacts of COVID-19 are enormous, leading to over 6.24 million deaths as at 5^th May 2022, and a cost of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per thousand of the global population estimated at 31,930 for the first year of the pandemic (Fan et al., 2021). Worldwide, up to 43% of COVID-19 survivors have reported long COVID symptoms (such as extreme tiredness, cognitive deterioration, loss of memory, joint and muscle pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations) that have persisted for months after infection (Chen et al., 2022). The mental health burden of COVID-19 is also significant – triggering a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression globally (World Health Organization, 2022).

The pandemic has also had a huge impact on the world economy, with an estimated cost of US $12.5 trillion, leading to significant drops in GDP; more than 144 million job losses; stock market crashes, manufacturing, production, and supply chain disruption; increases in the price of housing and basic commodities; and inflation (International Monetary Fund, 2022). Inequality has increased exponentially during the pandemic, with global billionaire wealth rising by over $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021 alone, while over 100 million people fell below the poverty line during the same period (Chancel et al., 2022). COVID-19 has challenged governments to engage in huge-scale state intervention in terms of mass testing, tracing and vaccination, income support, and housing policies to prevent homelessness – seemingly going against the neoliberal principles of many societies (Gerbaudo, 2021). While social cohesion, care and collective responsibility have been prominent features of the human response to COVID-19, the pandemic has also arguably led to a weakening of democracy due to the imposition of emergency state powers, lockdowns, restrictions on socialisation and movement, and bans on mass assembly and protest (Daly, 2022).

The pandemic has caused disruption to domestic and working lives. Family and other personal relationships have suffered due to health, economic and social pressures, forced separation, and a loss of social connectivity (Helliwell et al., 2022). Those already food insecure were put under increased pressure during the pandemic (Mardones et al., 2020). New ways of engaging with health services have created further inequalities of access. For example, telehealth appointments, digital prescriptions, and contactless delivery of medicines mean those without digital skills can be left behind (Stone, 2021). Furthermore, migration to regional and rural areas in many countries has occurred, which has changed the way people live and work and created pressure on house prices and services for locals (e.g. Australian Government Centre for Population, 2020). The employment world has witnessed a shift to working from home (Islam, 2022), providing both benefits and challenges, with some struggling with the mental health implications of prolonged periods at home (Oakman et al., 2020). Some sectors (including higher education) have experienced massive job losses.

Meanwhile, pandemic life has provided the backdrop for key political, environmental, and social events. The Black Lives Matter social movement has focused our attention on racism and our dysfunctional race relations (Taylor, 2016). Climate disaster such as bushfires, floods, and droughts have increasingly affected people, flora, and fauna during this time (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021), and the political responses by governments have come into focus. Rising nationalism, popularism, protectionism, and political extremism have also emerged (Moffit, 2016), and women’s rights are under attack with the recent US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. Standards in public life appear to be falling – consider for example the UK Government’s Partygate scandal (Cabinet Office, 2022), the pork barrel politics deployed by the previous Australian Government (McAllister, 2022), or President Trump scheming to overturn his electoral defeat in 2021 (Jacobson, 2021). All of this has given rise to questions about the limitations and failings of our forms of social organisation. Questions have been asked about COVID-19 as another example of disaster capitalism (see Klein, 2007), or whether there is an opportunity to build back better (Parker, 2020). As critical social marketers, this volatile context encourages us to consider where Critical Social Marketing is heading.

In seeking to understand the likely long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, a range of future priorities have been identified. The British Academy of Management (2021) has identified key areas of long-term impact that contextualise future social change ambitions and strategies. These include the importance of local communities; low levels of trust in governance; widening geographic inequalities; increasing structural inequalities; poorer health outcomes and growing health inequalities; greater awareness of the importance of mental health; economic pressures on nations; rising unemployment and shifts in the labour market; and renewed awareness of education and skills. There is also continued research and tracking of the pandemic in the Global South (e.g. United Nations, 2021b), where the impacts of the pandemic have been different from countries like the UK or Australia. Countries in the Global South such as Indonesia, Peru, and South Africa have been hit hard economically by the crisis, and the pandemic has had a long-term detrimental impact on leadership and governance, education, migration opportunities, manufacturing, and trade, as well as poverty and population health (Alcazar et al., 2021; Chowdhury & Jomo, 2020). It is against this backdrop that social marketing faces the challenges of tackling a range of different wicked problems across the globe as we move forward into a post-pandemic, if not a post-COVID-19, era. However, it also provides a context for the important questions that are central in critical social marketing, which focus on critically exploring social marketing’s ways of working, its priorities, partners, and premises.

To this end, we acknowledge the extant criticisms of social marketing – for being unethical (Laczniak & Michie, 1979), lacking reflexivity (Tadajewski & Brownlie, 2008), being power agnostic (Brace-Govan, 2015), being neoliberally oriented (Moor, 2011), being culturally insensitive and imperialist (Pfeiffer, 2004), being pseudo-participatory (Tadajewski et al., 2014) and for responsibilising the individual (Crawshaw, 2012). Accordingly, we recognise that social marketing needs the resources and repertoires available to appropriately respond to the current challenges and to critique. We argue that key pillars to this response are the adoption of a more critical research agenda (Gordon, 2018), a broader theoretical base, and a commitment to careful reflexivity, each of which are commitments of CSM. This special section of the Journal of Marketing Management on ‘Critical Social Marketing: Towards Emancipation’ provides the space to grapple with extant and emergent critique within the contextual challenges of our time, and to collectively contribute to the development of CSM and its future agenda.

In this article, we first set out the current CSM landscape, positioning current scholarship within the history and development of the field. Next, we introduce the papers in this special section. Finally, we build on the topics, issues, and approaches within these papers, combined with our own reflections, to set out a future agenda for CSM.

Charting the CSM landscape

Gordon (2018) explains that CSM involves critically analysing social marketing theories, concepts, discourses, and practice and/or examining the deleterious impact of commercial marketing activities on social marketing problems – to generate critique, conflict and change that facilitates emancipatory social good. In social marketing, ‘social good’ refers to the inherent goal to improve personal and societal welfare (Andreasen, 1994). CSM scholarship seeks to question the normative values, ethics, morals, politics, theories, methods, principles, and practices of social marketing. There are many issues that could potentially fall within a CSM agenda, including but not limited to: critical reflexivity, power, subjectivity, ethics, morals, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, culture, colonisation, post-colonialism and decolonisation, critiques of commercial marketing, non-representational theory and methods, consumer vulnerability, corporate social marketing, race and ethnicity, neoliberal capitalism, unintended consequences, and de-individualisation through bio-socio-material perspectives. These areas signpost bodies of literature and theoretical perspectives that help us think differently about the social problems that social marketing seeks to address, or to engage differently with the lived experiences of priority groups who are the focus of social marketing programmes. CSM is not about ‘fiddling around the edges’ in ways that merely manage or reproduce the existing social order. Rather, it is committed to drawing on novel perspectives to enable social marketing to work for emancipatory social change.

Furthermore, drawing on these critical approaches helps to enrich the perspectives, theories, methods, interpretations, and practices of social marketers working with governments, charities, agencies, and communities to tackle social problems. Importantly, CSM is not simply about critique for its own sake but should seek to help social marketing shift towards a more ethical, inclusive, representative, and reflexive approach to behaviour, and social change. To paraphrase Karl Marx (1888/1998), the purpose of CSM is not to only interpret the world, the point is to change it.

Critical perspectives in social marketing are not new. Lazer and Kelley (1973), among others, called for the inclusion of a critical focus to analyse the social impacts of marketing and provide a form of social audit to hold commercial marketing to account. This is reflected in their definition of social marketing as being ‘Concerned with the application of marketing knowledge, concepts, and techniques to enhance social as well as economic ends. It is also concerned with the analysis of the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions, and activities [emphasis added]’ (p. ix). Later, Marvin Goldberg (1995, p. 347) criticised the normative individualistic focus of social marketing and called for ‘a more radical approach … that emphasises efforts to change the negative or constraining social structural influences on individual behaviour, particularly those that originate as a function of marketing activities’, arguing that this should be ‘tied to the more radical critical theory approach’. However, it is only in recent years that a nascent stream of CSM scholarship has begun to emerge (Gordon, 2018).

Initially, CSM work tended to focus externally on critiques of the deleterious impact on people and society of commercial marketing of alcohol (Goldberg et al., 1994), tobacco (MacFadyen et al., 2001) and food marketing (McDermott et al., 2006). Social marketers researching these issues also participated in social activism by engaging in policy advocacy and acting as expert witnesses in parliamentary inquiries that led to regulation and changes in the laws regulating marketing (Gordon, 2011). Scholarship then began to increasingly focus internally on critical issues in social marketing. For example, Spotswood et al. (2012) posed several questions about the assumptions at the heart of social marketing, including whether social marketing can ever really involve voluntary behaviour change and how ‘social good’ can be defined. This thread has been picked up more recently by Szablewska and Kubacki (2019), who argue that reflecting on established understandings of human rights can offer a guiding ethos for discerning social good in social marketing.

Scholars have also critiqued the use of outdated concepts such as the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) in social marketing, and presented alternative ideas for the social marketing mix (Gordon, 2012; Peattie & Peattie, 2003, 2011; Tapp & Spotswood, 2013). Research has also begun to explore the way social marketing contributes to public discourse that feeds into cultural norms relating to positive and damaging behaviours (Gurrieri et al., 2013; Sutinen & Närvänen, 2022). For example, Gurrieri et al. (2013) critiques stigmatic gendered representations of women’s bodies in social marketing campaigns, with subsequent work outlining the need for a more gender and culturally representative and equality-focused approach to behaviour change marketing (Martam, 2016).

CSM scholars have also begun to attend to questions of power that underpin social marketing. Scholars have called for attention to be paid to how power is held, distributed, and functions in marketing for social change (Anker et al., 2022; Brace-Govan, 2015); as well as the function of social marketing in reinforcing power (Raftopoulou & Hogg, 2010). Other important scholarship illuminates the ways that ethical decision making is underpinned by organisational and collective values (Brace-Govan, 2015), and has begun to draw on frameworks from different traditions to help social marketers evaluate ethical issues (Dann & Dann, 2016). Through CSM, social marketers have acknowledged, and attended to, a need to become more critically reflexive, not only as researchers, but also as change agents working with multiple stakeholders in which collectively reflexive praxis is important (Gordon & Gurrieri, 2014; Kariippanon et al., 2020).

Relating to questions of ethics and power, CSM scholars have recognised the limitations of a narrow downstream focus that has tended to characterise the conceptualisation of behaviour and behaviour change in social marketing (Dibb, 2014; Spotswood et al., 2017). Downstream social marketing and individualistic assumptions are entangled. Individualism tends to dominate due to the narrow repertoire of theory in social marketing (Truong, 2014), which often frame problem behaviours as a matter of individual deficit. These approaches set behavioural and intervention goals that seek to encourage better decision making (Welch, 2016). CSM has problematised unreflexive, downstream social marketing as embedded in an outdated ‘traditionalist’ paradigm (Gordon & Gurrieri, 2014). Such social marketing is seen as failing to recognise its contribution to cultural norms. Rather, individuals’ personal, psychological, and behavioural deficits are the focus of research and intervention. Without reflexivity, social marketing can be criticised as a force that fails to challenge the status quo or question the political and organisational systems from which problematic patterns of behaviour emerge.

CSM has developed several theoretically informed advances to enrich social marketing and counter the responsibilising critique. Research has long emphasised the need for upstream social marketing (Gordon, 2013; Hennink-Kaminski et al., 2018). That is, to influence and mobilise policymakers and create structures that provide people with the ability to change (Kennedy et al., 2018). Reaching further, systems social marketing offers an established stream of scholarship (Domegan et al., 2016; Duane & Domegan, 2019; French & Gordon, 2015) that explores the full-scale systemic change necessary for achieving social change in the context of large-scale problems such as energy conservation, health, well-being, and financial vulnerability (Dibb et al., 2021; Gordon, Butler et al., 2018). Aligning with the politically popular ‘behavioural insights’ approaches to policy, social marketing scholarship has also drawn on the conceptual, methodological, and procedural aspects of behavioural economics in developing interventions that seek to shift behaviour through shaping non-reflexive behaviours rather than necessarily requiring citizen involvement (Dessart & van Bavel, 2017).

Also rethinking the interplay of structure and agency, bio-socio-material perspectives draw on practice theory, actor-network theory, and assemblage thinking to frame interventions as seeking to transition embodied collective practices (Gordon, Waitt et al., 2018; Närvänen et al., 2018; Sutinen & Närvänen, 2022). Social marketing in this stream reframes social problems in terms of how practitioners’ habituated, embodied performances relate to practice blueprints and conventions (Spotswood, Vihalemm et al., 2021), or by reframing interventions as requiring a transformation in the social arrangements of everyday life that are shaped by neoliberal capitalist ideology (Gordon et al., 2021).

Recently, CSM has incorporated discussions on race, ethnocentricity, and a need to decolonise social marketing, in response to the dominance of Western modes of thought that frame behaviour change programmes. As Martam (2016) illustrates in a case study of a gender violence programme in Indonesia, social marketing can only be effective if it is culturally sensitive and appropriate. This argument is further developed by Kariippanon et al. (2020) who consider culturally appropriate and methodologically plural approaches to social marketing in the context of the Yolngu story of tobacco in Arnhem Land, Australia. Grier and Poole (2020) challenged social marketers and social marketing to stand for Black Lives Matter! Meanwhile the work of Bádéjọ́ et al. (2019; 2021) has introduced African-centred perspectives, and espoused context-specific intersectionality informed approaches to social marketing for change. So, there has been some progress in developing and advancing a CSM agenda, but more needs to be done. It is with this purpose that we are honoured to bring you this special section of Journal of Marketing Management on ‘Critical Social Marketing: Towards Emancipation’.

About the papers in this special section

This special section features four peer-reviewed articles and one commentary, plus this editorial. Each of the papers included in the special section speak to critical issues and perspectives in social marketing, and they challenge us, as social marketers, to think deeply and reflexively about our theory, methods, research, and practice.

Our first paper in this special section is ‘Integrating gender into social marketing programmes’ by Nathaly Aya Pastrana, Claire Somerville, and Suzanne Suggs. Their conceptual paper comprehensively considers the various social forces that interact with gender to produce advantage and disadvantage. They present a pathway for gender integration approaches that evaluates the gender responsiveness of social marketing programmes and helps ensure greater gender equality. The authors map how this could be achieved through gender-responsive social marketing research involving issue identification and participant selection; development and implementation; monitoring, evaluation, and learning; and reporting and dissemination. Beyond instrumental approaches to ensuring that social marketing programmes are gender responsive, Aya Pastrana et al. (2022) consider the need to embrace critical reflexivity and attend to decolonisation movements.

The next paper, entitled ‘Empowerment in social marketing: Systematic review and critical reflection’, is written by Tanja Kamin, Krzysztof Kubacki and Sara Atanasova. Their research systematically reviews and critically reflects upon the extant social marketing literature that engages with the concept of empowerment. They discuss the importance and relevance of empowerment theory for social marketing. However, they also point to issues with contrasting definitions, scope, and purpose of the concept, as well as misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misuse of empowerment in practice. Kamin et al. (2022) illustrate the multilevel, complex and polysemic nature of the empowerment concept, while also offering some conceptual clarity. They present a framework that focuses on processes, levels, dimensions, outcomes, and characteristics of empowerment that can be utilised for social marketing research and practice.

The paper that follows is entitled ‘A strength-based approach to eliciting deep insights from social marketing customers/consumers experiencing vulnerability’, by Maria Raciti, Rebekah Russell-Bennett, and Kate Letheren. This thought-provoking article challenges the dominant deficit-based approaches to vulnerability in social marketing. Raciti et al. (2022) offer an alternative, strengths-based approach, and illustrate how this can be successful through a research case study on widening participation in higher education. Drawing on their research insights, they offer a new strengths-based definition of consumer vulnerability. They also present a five-step evidence-based process for how social marketers working with consumers experience vulnerability through: (1) sharing experiences of vulnerability between researchers and participants; (2) developing a narrative approach to elicit deep insights; (3) co-designing strengths-based personas; (4) co-designing solutions to address barriers and motivators; and (5) co-designing solution attributes.

The fourth paper in the special section is ‘Practice-Based Social Marketing to Improve Well-being for People with Intellectual Disabilities’ by Angela Makris and Ariadne Kapetanaki. In this conceptual paper, the authors critique individualising approaches to social marketing and state the case for greater engagement with social practice theory, which they argue is particularly important to guide programmes for improving the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, where questions of agency, power and routine are complex. They call for social marketers to focus more on understanding about how practice elements including bodies, materials, structures, technologies, language, and meanings come together to shape everyday enactments including those involving physical activity. They present theoretically informed insights that, they argue, can inform social marketing approaches to transitioning the various elements that support practice routines. For example, new policies and materials can enable disabled people to enjoy gardening as a form of physical activity that also stimulates the mind. In doing so, Makris and Kapetanaki (2022) submit that a practice-based approach can better acknowledge and account for different bodily, intellectual, and agential capacities in social marketing contexts, and sidestep the traditional reliance on individual level engagement with behaviour and change, with the social marketing value exchange and with citizen risk and responsibility.

The final paper is a commentary ‘Reflections on some of the key issues and challenges for marketing for social good’ featuring contributions from Folúké Bádéjọ́, Pauline Maclaran, Andreas Chatzidakis, and Simone Pettigrew. These leading scholars are from different career stages and with different substantive foci, and are all interested in the intersection of marketing and social change. We asked each of our contributors to reflect on four key questions:

1. What do you see as the biggest issues facing marketing for social change into the future?

2. What does CSM mean to you?

3. What opportunities to you see for CSM to interact with other disciplines and domains within marketing scholarship also interested in social problems and social change?

4. Looking forward, what do you think the challenges might be in translating ideas from CSM into policy and practice?

Through their answers, each of our contributors offers their perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and future research directions for CSM. For example, contributors recognise the need for CSM to adopt an interdisciplinary approach and to join forces with social change activists working across disciplinary lines, to engage more with feminist, intersectionality, and decolonisation perspectives. They also submit that (critical) social marketing needs to break the shackles of individualising neoliberal market capitalism, to focus more on social, economic, and ecological determinants of complex social problems; and to work towards disruptive, rather than merely incremental change. Finally, they reflect on the need for CSM to develop a stronger identity, account for power more critically, and more effectively engender policy change, as well as clearly delineating its political and post-neoliberal orientations.

While the publication of this special section represents an important step in the development of a critical agenda for social marketing, there is work to be done. With this in mind, we would like to offer some of our own reflections on what a future research agenda for CSM might include. This agenda builds on the ideas developed in the special section papers and provides an enhanced sense of where CSM is heading.

A future agenda for CSM

Here, we offer some ideas on a future CSM research agenda that are shaped by the papers and the topics of focus in this special section, supplemented by some of our own reflections. The aim is not to be exhaustive in recognising these opportunities for future directions, but to encourage scholars to extend, enrich, strengthen, and critique the existing knowledge base through ideas that can further advance the field. We outline our suggested research agenda according to the following themes:

• CSM’s relationship with other ‘marketing and society’ sub-disciplines

• Power and politics in social marketing

• The changing nature of vulnerability

• Context-specific intersectionalities

• Bio-socio-material understandings of social problems and social change

• Teaching CSM

Within each of these themes, we offer some context to the opportunities for developing CSM, followed by research propositions and research questions that can help guide future research in these areas.

Developing CSM’s relationship with other sub-disciplines in marketing

While social marketing has a long history (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971; Levy, 2017; Wiebe, 1951), CSM is a nascent field (Gordon, 2018). As discussed by Bádéjọ́ et al. (2022) in this special section, this means that in a crowded landscape featuring various academic disciplines and brands, and approaches pertaining to behaviour and social change, this presents challenges in how CSM is distinguished from, and relates to, other disciplines. However, we also identify that there are opportunities for CSM scholars to form intra-, inter- and trans-disciplinary connections (see Gordon et al., 2017), and contribute in meaningful ways to collaborative projects with shared pro-social agendas.

In marketing scholarship, a range of sub-disciplines such as critical marketing (Tadajewski et al., 2018), transformative consumer research (TCR) (Mick et al., 2012), transformative service research (Ostrom et al., 2010), macromarketing (Hunt, 1981), and sustainable marketing (Kemper & Ballantine, 2019) all have an established focus on social problems and their solution. Furthermore, sub-discipline areas such as TCR and sustainable marketing have arguably the strongest support of leading scholars and scholarly associations, as well as the gatekeepers within the ‘top’ journals. Publishing in the highest-ranked journals is, of course, an important priority for most marketing academics (Soutar et al., 2015). While earlier social marketing scholarship regularly appeared in top outlets such as the Journal of Marketing (see Bloom & Novelli, 1981; Fox & Kotler, 1980; Kotler & Zaltman, 1971), it is noticeable in recent years that this is not the case. This can perhaps cause some to conclude that the relevance of social marketing as a sub-discipline has diminished.

However, we do not subscribe to this view given the unique contribution that social marketing makes to pro-social change. Social marketing is an established, recognised approach to behaviour and social change, which has been used widely across the world. There are thousands of examples of social marketing programmes being deployed by national governments, NGOs, charities, supra-national bodies, and more (Firestone et al., 2017; Stead et al., 2007). Additionally, it is social marketing that is represented at the World Health Organisation’s Technical Advisory Group for Behavioural Sciences for Health. A key distinguishing feature of social marketing is its focus on intervention through the delivery of multi-faceted and multi-level behaviour and social change programmes to engender social good (French & Gordon, 2019). This is a point of differentiation in comparison with other marketing sub-disciplines that, like social marketing, feature action research (TCR), focus on transformative service delivery (TSR), critique marketing’s deleterious effects (critical marketing), or examine the relationship between marketing systems and society (macromarketing). Given the critical contribution of social marketing, we identify that collaboration across the marketing discipline, incorporating CSM with TSR, TCR, critical marketing, sustainable marketing, and macromarketing, holds great potential for tackling complex social problems.

As recognised in this special section and throughout CSM scholarship, social marketing needs to become more theoretically innovative, more rigorous and reflexive, and yet maintain its relevance. We hope that driving forward a critical agenda in social marketing will help. This, in turn, may help facilitate the broader recognition that social marketing remains an important part of marketing and society scholarship and an important approach to social change, and it may help foster collaboration between social marketing and other socially-oriented marketing sub-disciplines. Each, after all, has specific strengths and unique perspectives and can bring value to projects tackling complex challenges. Indeed, collaborative, and transdisciplinary approaches are needed to solve the complex social problems we face (Ewert, 2020). Working across social marketing, TCR, TSR, critical marketing, and social marketing, and bringing in ideas from other disciplines grounded in sociology, psychology, human geography, public health, engineering, and biology improves the likelihood that effective solutions to these complex problems will be found. We encourage marketing and society scholars to focus more collaboratively on making real and lasting impact for social change. Future research could explore questions including:

• RQ: What are the key differences and synergies between CSM and other sub-disciplines; including TCR, TSR, critical marketing, sustainable marketing, and micromarketing?

• RQ: How can collaborations across social marketing, TCR, TSR, critical marketing, sustainable marketing, and macromarketing be used productively to tackle complex social problems, such as the climate emergency, racism, or gender inequality?

• RQ: What are the opportunities and impacts emerging from transdisciplinary collaborations across marketing and society sub-disciplines and other academic domains; including sociology, psychology, behavioural science, human geography, public health, engineering, and biology?

Power and politics

Bertrand Russell (1938, p. 10, emphasis added) submits that ‘the fundamental concept in social science is Power’. For CSM, power relates to the capacity to influence people, events, materials, resource, and structures to bring about pro-social behaviour change (Anker et al., 2022). As Michel Foucault (1978 p. 93) explains, ‘power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’. Yet, social marketing has been criticised for being power agnostic, or for overlooking and misconstruing social power (Anker et al., 2022; Brace-Govan, 2015). This is despite social marketing focusing on complex social problems, often featuring multiple stakeholders with competing priorities about what represents social good and how it should be realised (French & Gordon, 2019; Raftopoulou & Hogg, 2010). This gap in the literature perhaps reflects the dominant positivist paradigm in social marketing (Gordon & Gurrieri, 2014), a desire to receive the grace and favour of neoliberal governments, and the limited focus on power in mainstream marketing scholarship since the 1970s (see Anderson, 1987). However, as the papers in this special section demonstrate, power is now becoming foregrounded in the CSM agenda (Aya Pastrana et al., 2022; Kamin et al., 2022; Raciti et al., 2022)

We take the view that power in CSM should not be considered as a static force, institution, or represented by structure or agency. Rather, we follow Foucault (1980) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980) in understanding that power is multiplicitous, relational, and operates as a productive force of desire which flows through, shapes, and is shaped by people, events, institutions, organisations, social relations, meanings, and behaviour and social change efforts. Working from this ontology, we identify that power, and its effects should form a key area of focus for CSM.

Such work can build upon existing conceptual (Brace-Govan, 2015) and empirical work (Waitt et al., 2016) that has begun to consider power in social marketing. CSM needs to attend to power imbalances, particularly when considering who decides what issues are important (Raftopoulou & Hogg, 2010), which priority groups should be the focus, how desired behaviours are represented (Sutinen, 2022), and what is meant by positive behaviour and social change, and social good (Gordon, 2018). Critical research is also needed to shine a light on how normative approaches to social marketing have further weakened collective power, empowered neoliberal capitalist elites, and served to responsibilise the individual to deal with a myriad of complex social problems on their own (Moor, 2011).

Scholars, including those publishing in this special section, have argued for the transference of power away from social marketers as managers of behaviour and social change, towards the consumer (Anker et al., 2022; Kamin et al., 2022; Kariippanon et al., 2020). However, we must also guard against the risks that this serves to further responsibilise the consumer, which future research in this area can help unpack. Furthermore, rather than only focusing on power at the individual level, there is a need for CSM research to consider collective power; for example, how social change can be made possible through social movements (Gurrieri et al., 2018). Research has also begun to draw attention to the importance of organisational power and how governments, corporations, community organisations, and other bodies wield power in social marketing contexts (Brace-Govan, 2015; Brenkert, 2002; Waitt et al., 2016). Further insights, driven by a CSM research agenda, could help unpack power dynamics between social marketing organisations and consumers, and consider who, how and why, bodies wield or are subject to power. CSM work, including studies appearing in this special section, is now also considering how people can become empowered, and what are the implications from adopting an empowerment agenda (Anker et al., 2022; Kamin et al., 2022; Raciti et al., 2022).

A future CSM research agenda can also interrogate colonial and decolonial power dynamics especially when social marketing is used in Global South contexts (Bádéjọ́ et al., 2021). Work in this area might consider how colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial power structures affect social marketing ideas and practices, and how these might be re-cast as part of a decolonising agenda (Bádéjọ́ & Gordon, 2022; Raciti, 2021a). There is also a need to consider how power and politics within social marketing have led to the continued marginalisation of Global South voices in the sub-discipline (Cateriano-Arévalo et al., 2022). Critical studies are needed to unpack how academic power, the power of journal editors, thought ‘leaders’ and decision makers in social marketing, especially those who ascribe to normative and essentialising approaches, use power to serve their own priorities and interests rather than working towards emancipatory social change (see Raciti, 2021b).

This leads us to the importance of politics and political power in social marketing. As Gordon (2018) explains, political ideology, the political landscape, and who holds political power have had major influences over social marketing, the funding environment and the appetite for programmes. They have also influenced what sort of approaches, through which theoretical and ideological lenses, are ‘deemed desirable’. Yet politics has historically been overlooked in social marketing despite its convergence with political marketing (Raftopoulou & Hogg, 2010) and questions over the framing of citizens as consumers (Ryan, 2001). In this line, the field has been associated with neo-liberal and conservative politics (Moor, 2011). For CSM scholars who subscribe to a progressive, social justice-oriented and/or post-capitalist political agenda, there is important work to be done here: first, to map the existing political landscape of social marketing and second, to chart and articulate what the politics of CSM are, might and should be. Doing so might aid critical social marketers to better represent the politics that they believe in and become more prominent as social activists rather than simply behaviour change technicians and commentators. Some important research questions concerning power and politics for CSM might include:

RQ: How is power produced and reproduced in social marketing and what impact does this have on consumers, communities, stakeholders, and behaviour and social change outcomes?

RQ: How can power imbalances be challenged in social marketing contexts?

RQ: How could power become a productive and positive force in social marketing

The changing nature of vulnerability

Vulnerability is a pervasive theme in social marketing research and fundamental to how individual and social wellbeing are experienced. As social marketers, how we understand vulnerability has important implications for what and how we research and practice. A recent review of more than 300 papers by Riedel et al. (2022) reveals a body of work that has considered vulnerability in terms of people’s defined characteristics, how it is experienced, and in relation to the overarching macro context in which it arises. Much of this work has been influenced by Baker et al.’s (2005) foundational paper on consumer vulnerability, which has been widely used to understand the unequal power relations that lead to disadvantage (Schröder-Butterfill & Marianti, 2006).

Despite this burgeoning interest, concerns have been raised about how this vulnerability is conceptualised in marketing and consumption scholarship and the implications for how research is framed. These include criticism of the individualising emphasis on the vulnerable consumer, which can lead to stereotypical notions of ‘the vulnerable’ (Hill & Sharma, 2020); and criticism of ‘deficit’ perspective that focus on the powerlessness of those affected, rather than their underlying circumstances (Dunnett et al., 2016; Riedel et al., 2022). The special section papers provide rich fodder for our reflection, providing a timely opportunity to consider whether we are sufficiently critical in how vulnerability is framed within social marketing research.

Reflecting the current challenges facing global societies, we call for a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability that reflects the multiplicity of complex and overlapping factors leading to powerlessness today. We write at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the vulnerability of the already disadvantaged and has refocused global attention on this issue. In the UK, Black and South Asian minorities have, for reasons that are complex and varied, suffered the most detrimental health and economic COVID-19 outcomes (Office for National Statistics, 2022). And across the globe, older people, those disabled, and those chronically sick, have also been hard hit; a situation in some cases exacerbated by government decisions about the delivery of health and other services during the pandemic (Shakespeare et al., 2021). Many of those labelled as ‘vulnerable’ and required to socially isolate to avoid the virus have seen their existing vulnerabilities compounded by negative effects to their social and mental wellbeing. Others have seen poor health outcomes worsened as access to medical and social care services were disrupted or delivered digitally (Stone, 2021).

Social marketing research needs to investigate how such multiple and complex issues interact to reduce agency, especially amongst those who are already vulnerable or whose situation is worsening. To take action to diminish these effects, we must deepen our understanding of the underlying social, cultural, and systemic factors that are driving disadvantage – and draw on wider theoretical perspectives (Rundle-Thiele et al., 2019) – such as from feminist studies (Gurrieri et al., 2013), intersectionality (Bádéjọ́ et al., 2021) and systems thinking (Domegan et al., 2016) - when designing our research and interventions. For example, the complex factors that underscore vulnerability are familiar territory for intersectionality researchers (Crenshaw, 2019). Rather than viewing disadvantage as affected by a primary factor such as gender, which is supplemented by other factors, such as socioeconomics or health status (e.g. Lee et al., 1999), an intersectionality perspective takes a multiplicative view of the connections within and across disadvantaged groups. This reveals the power dynamics beneath (Aya Pastrana et al., 2022; Bádéjọ́ et al., 2021; Corus et al., 2016). By embracing this kind of approach, social marketers can achieve a deeper understanding of the underlying structural drivers of individual and group-based vulnerability (Commuri & Ekici, 2008), and gain insights into how the resulting vulnerabilities might be addressed (Schulz et al., 2006).

We now turn to the question of ‘how’ critical social marketers might account for vulnerability within their research and practice. These kinds of reflexive methodological questions are not new for social marketing (Gordon & Gurrieri, 2014). Here, they require us to challenge our existing assumptions about vulnerability and to consider how our own vulnerability influences our practices as researchers. The special section paper by Raciti et al. (2022) brings these kinds of questions to the fore. In developing a strengths-based definition of vulnerability, the authors criticise the dominant ‘deficit’ view and its emphasis on the powerlessness of individuals, which obscures emphasis on their potential to become resilient and overcome their susceptibility. They also challenge being too reliant on damaging stereotypes about ‘who’ is deemed vulnerable, such as has been seen in initiatives to widen higher education access based on over-simplistic assumptions about lower socioeconomic status. As critical social marketers in pursuit of effective intervention, this reinforces the need to identify and distance ourselves from the kind of ‘perceived vulnerability’ (Smith & Cooper-Martin, 1997) that is imposed by ‘well-meaning others’ (Baker et al., 2005, p. 128); so that we can clearly acknowledge how individuals or groups perceive their own vulnerability (de Clercq et al., 2015), that this is often a temporary state that can be addressed (Baker et al., 2007), and that those concerned have agency in addressing the disadvantage they may face (Kariippanon et al., 2020; Saatcioglu & Corus, 2014).

This leads us back to the much-discussed relationship between power and powerlessness, and how we understand it in our research (Rucker et al., 2012). Although those experiencing oppression or facing disadvantage can be made vulnerable, we should also recognise that situations in which we are completely powerless or entirely lack agency are rare. As critical social marketers, this reinforces the need to avoid stereotypes about the powerlessness of others and to design our research and interventions in ways that genuinely engage with, and meet the needs of, target groups (Santos et al., 2021).

Finally, everyone can and does experience vulnerability (Shultz & Holbrook, 2009), with social marketers being no exception. As Raciti et al. (2022) explain, acknowledging our positionality within the research process and recognising that we are neither neutral nor value-free, is therefore important. As they explain, Raciti et al. (2022) shared their experiences of vulnerability with participants, helping to foster trust and rapport. This raises interesting possibilities for how positionality could be recognised and declared within research settings, and we encourage new thinking about how this could be achieved.

Several important questions could be explored in relation to the changing nature of vulnerability:

• RQ: How can new ways of conceptualising vulnerability lead to more effective social marketing intervention design and delivery?

• RQ: What are the opportunities to draw on wider theoretical perspectives, such as feminist studies, intersectionality and systems thinking, to develop a more critical understanding of consumer vulnerability and how can it be addressed within the context of complex social problems?

• RQ: What does it mean to be reflexive when researching vulnerability and how can the adoption of more critical methodologies and research practices deepen how we understand and respond to vulnerability?

Context-specific intersectionalities

The importance of adopting a context-specific intersectionality-informed approach has been raised in this special section. Crenshaw (1989, p. 149) provides the following analogy to explain intersectionality:

Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction and it may flow in another. If an accident happens at an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

For CSM, the adoption of an intersectional perspective requires a recognition of how personal, social, cultural, and political identities including gender, race, class, ethnicity, culture, language, sexuality, and (dis)ability intersect to produce and reproduce power, privilege, oppression, and social injustice (Crenshaw, 2019). That is, intersectionality enables us to consider where power is held, how it is transmitted and what effects it has on people’s lives (Crenshaw, 2019). As Aya Pastrana et al. (2022) and Bádéjọ́ et al. (2022) discuss in this special section, through adopting an intersectionality-informed perspective, critical social marketers can become better equipped to expose, understand, and hopefully to challenge the asymmetric power dynamics that undergird many social problems.

This challenges social marketers to move beyond treating concepts such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, culture, language, sexuality, and (dis)ability as characteristics and variables that are discrete, measurable, and mutually exclusive. Instead, social marketers could be encouraged to consider how such personal, social, cultural, and political factors work together to shape social problems such as health inequalities, climate change, gender representation, and substance use. Furthermore, as Bádéjọ́ et al. (2021) identify, it is also important that social marketers recognise that intersectionalities are understood as context-specific. Whereas for African-American women issues such as race, gender and class may be the most prominent intersections that produce privilege and oppression (Crenshaw, 2019), in countries like Nigeria, race may not be as prominent as intersections of gender, class, culture, spirituality, and neo-colonialism (Bádéjọ́ et al., 2021). Indeed, there are critical debates regarding the dominant Western framing, and white middle-class feminist colonisation of intersectionality theory (Menon, 2015). This has led to calls for the development of Global South, context-specific and emic intersectionality perspectives (Bádéjọ́ et al., 2021; David, 2019). For CSM, this will also require engaging in a decolonising agenda towards epistemological plurality (Cateriano-Arévalo et al., 2022) and Indigenous-led research and action (Kariippanon et al., 2020; Raciti, 2021a). Undoubtedly, these are important issues for critical social marketers to consider, and which generate some clear suggestions for future research questions including, but not limited to:

• RQ: How can intersectionality enable us to better conceptualise and understand the nature of social marketing problems?

• RQ: How do different social and political identities intersect to produce privilege and oppression across social marketing contexts?

• RQ: How can social marketing practice intervene to reduce the intersectional oppressions experienced by people?

Bio-socio-material understandings of social problems and social change

In recent years, there has been an increase in critical conversations about approaches to social change, including forms of social marketing, that inadvertently responsibilise individuals by eliding attention on the political, social, structural, and material forces that shape social problems (Gordon, 2013; Kelly & Barker, 2016), which are in turn reconstituted through behaviour (Crawshaw, 2013; Spotswood et al., 2017). This well-established critique is beginning to be recognised in intergovernmental public health and behaviour change discussions (World Health Organization 2021b).

The most widely used approach to social change that avoids simplistic assumptions of individual agency and rational decision making is behavioural economics, on which ‘nudge’ approaches are grounded (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). This represents advancement at a policymaking level by disestablishing the flawed notion of ‘appealing to people’s logic if we wish them to change their behaviour’ (Kelly & Barker, 2016, p. 112). Western neoliberal conservative governments have been drawn to these behavioural economics approaches, which shape the ‘choice architecture’ or deploy a range of messaging approaches to nudge people to make better decisions. Examples are auto-enrolling processes that ensure workers are part of pension schemes or recycling system redesign ensuring the desired behaviour is easy and appealing. However, behavioural economics, and specifically nudges, have been criticised for lacking in clear evidence of effectiveness (Möllenkamp et al., 2019), for being ethically questionable by diminishing autonomy, dignity, and civil liberties (Roberts, 2018; Schubert, 2015), for retaining underlying normative assumptions of homo economicus (Sugden, 2017), for being too closely aligned with neo-conservative neoliberal politics (Gane, 2021), and for lacking engagement with interdisciplinary ideas about behaviour and social change foundations (Ewert, 2020).

The predominant alternative to downstream behaviour change approaches is to focus intervention and policy efforts on ‘wider determinants’ (e.g. education, poverty) known to predict social problems (Liamputtong, 2019). This structural focus, however, has also been critiqued as conceptualising macro-social structures as ‘straightforwardly limiting, restricting or simply determining’ behaviour (Blue et al., 2016, p. 37). Both individualist, and structuralist-only approaches to social change quickly reach their limits, and neither has demonstrated exceptional success (Cohn, 2014). Furthermore, they ‘do not necessarily challenge the conceptual primacy of the individual and of his or her choices’ (Blue et al., 2016, p. 38).

In response to these critiques, there has been growing support for approaches that specifically account for the interplay between both structure and agency (Gordon, 2018). Examples increasingly being instilled in the behaviour and social change landscape include theories of social practice (Bourdieu, 1990; Shove et al., 2012), assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), actor-network theory (DeLanda, 2006), and new materialism (Braidotti, 2013). These ‘bio-socio-material perspectives’ have been recognised as offering distinct conceptual benefits for the study of social problems and for underpinning social change (Gordon et al., 2022). They principally serve to de-individualise social change and shift the focus beyond choices and deficits of individuals or structural determinants of action. They problematise assemblages that are simultaneously constituted of practices, materials, bodies, desires, structural forces, cultural ideals, emotions and affects, and conventions. They consider bio-socio-material arrangements as the units of enquiry and focus for social change. Such forms of theorising can help social marketers explore routinisation, repetition, and habituation, collective understandings, and engagements with repeated, habitual, unreflexive patterns of behaviour. These patterns are understood to emerge from the way structures and agency are enmeshed and repeatedly reconstitute through everyday activities. Many of these patterns, or practices, have implications for personal, collective, and environmental wellbeing.

The potential offered by bio-socio-material perspectives for CSM is considerable, as they can offer us valuable insights on how the complex interplay and mutual articulation between structure and agency leads people to behave in the ways that they do, and open up ideas for positive social change. In CSM scholarship, bio-socio-material perspectives have allowed for a focus on social and commercial marketing, and on media as shapers of discourses and cultural systems that influence or constrain the possibilities of behaviour change (Gurrieri et al., 2013; Sutinen & Närvänen, 2022). Other work has focused on the temporal and teleoaffective characteristics of practices (Spotswood et al., 2020; Spotswood, Nobles et al., 2021b) that require policy attention for social change to sustain, and on the way behaviours and subjectivities are constructed through the intersection of practices, policies, bodies, ideologies, and affects (Gordon et al., 2021, 2022; Waitt et al., 2016).

Makris and Kapetanaki’s (2022) paper in this special section emerges from this tradition, seeking to understand social change in a disability context, at the intersection of policy, practices, routine, and agency. Continuing and advancing this bio-socio-material informed behaviour and social change work represents an opportunity to expand the theoretical base of social marketing and build space for collaboration with related fields such as sociology, human geography, cultural studies, philosophy, sustainability, and transport; as well as marketing subfields such as Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), Public Policy and Marketing, and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR), where theories of practice, assemblage, and actor network theory are commonly utilised.

As well as drawing on the conceptual benefits of bio-socio-material theories, CSM scholarship needs also to reflect on how ideas of assemblage, disposition and cultural systems of practices connect with and question the conceptualisation of behaviour, voluntarism, and social change that are central in normative social marketing. There is work to be done in overcoming ontological conflict, and in working with social marketing practitioners to explore the benefits and possibilities for the approach, recently discussed at the 2022 European Social Marketing Conference in Greece. Particularly, the knowledge base of socio-culturally informed intervention is narrow (Sahakian & Wilhite, 2014; Strengers & Maller, 2016), and critical social marketers can contribute by sharing examples of how the implementation of social marketing that draws on sociocultural perspectives has been managed. Other research questions include:

• RQ: What do bio-socio-material theories mean for the assumptions of behaviour and behaviour change in social marketing?

• RQ: What are the conceptual and ethical advances of a bio-socio-material perspective for social marketing?

• RQ: What is the role of social marketing in shaping bio-socio-material transition attending to particular social challenges?

Teaching CSM

Although not a topic that specifically emerged in the papers contained within this special section, a further priority area for CSM research that we identify concerns education and teaching. We follow the lead of Tadajewski (2016), who identified the importance of critical marketing education, by calling for the development of a research and practice agenda concerning CSM education, teaching, and pedagogy. We contend that marketing for social change is an important application in which marketing can make a difference (Chandy et al., 2021), and as such social marketing should be core to marketing education. All interventions to improve wellbeing, including those focused on upstream policy and downstream behaviour change, to some extent will utilise marketing ideas and concepts. For example, units might include how intervention is informed by an understanding of the behaviour of participants, of the means used to target them, or of the way that the results are communicated, and the impact is achieved.

We identify that rethinking marketing education through the foregrounding of a CSM agenda could help emphasise critical thinking and reflexivity, as well as engage students, staff, and university stakeholders with a range of issues including power, ethics, colonialism and decolonisation, intersectionality, gender equality, politics, representation, and Indigenous knowledge. Furthermore, embedding CSM in marketing education would enable teachers and students to consider some of the most important social issues facing us all today; issues that students regularly tell us that they care about. These include climate change, health and well-being, inequality, homelessness, racism, violence, and gender equality (Best Colleges, 2021; World Economic Forum, 2017). Such an educational approach would align with the priorities of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as well as meet pedagogical objectives of supporting students to become critical, reflexive and socially responsible learners (Voola et al., 2022). We argue that such a shift in marketing education can act as a point of distinction for institutions prepared to be bold and move away from the cookie cutter corporate model that has dominated marketing degree programmes to this point and which reflect the neoliberal University (Gordon & Zainuddin, 2020).

Yet, despite a growing literature arguing for critical marketing to become core to marketing education, a critical perspective is often missing, other than as an ‘add on’ in the form of ethics units (Peleg, 2021). Maclaren and Tadajewski (Maclaran & Tadajewski, 2011, p. 300) explain the imperative for a critical turn in marketing education as ‘encouraging students to think about the wider implications of marketing activities and set these in their broader macro context … Critical Marketing Education, then, seeks to remind students as future for-profit and not-for-profit actors that all marketing practice takes place within society and that society ultimately sanctions its continued existence’. For example, critical perspectives are vital for exploring the range of implications of the growing tendency for corporate marketing to connect with ‘social’ purpose (Kennedy & Smith, 2022; Laczniak and Shultz, 2021; Patsiaouras, 2022; Vredenburg et al., 2020). Critical social marketers are well placed to consider the benefits of branding, promotional and broader marketing activities in the commercial sphere that have social agendas attached, or even those that create their own. As social purpose and social change infiltrates mainstream marketing, CSM is well placed to provide a balancing critique from ethical, political, and ideological perspectives. As Kennedy and Smith (2022) emphasise, it is important to explore the ethics, consequences, and broader systemic interrelations of social change marketing, whether this is for profit or not. Questions of the meaning of corporate citizenship, responsibility to stakeholders, and the conceptualisation of social good provide rich and important future research agendas.

Our perspective, that CSM is an important topic for marketing education, is inspired by a dual agenda. First, enriching the critical side of social marketing will improve its reputation amongst other academic disciplines. Exploring social marketing through a neutral lens, perhaps by providing case studies where marketing is used by governments to achieve social change, is important work but can ignore questions of power, politics, and ethics. Considering broader contexts, power relations, political ideology, and the representation of people and behaviours in social marketing will provide students, future social marketing scholars and practitioners, and potential collaborators from within and beyond other marketing and society areas of scholarship, with a broader understanding of social marketing and the theoretical bases on which it draws. Second, incorporating critical studies of social marketing in the education of future practitioners can help provide the foundation for a wider application of social marketing, alongside other approaches, in equitable, ethical, and reflexive ways. This dual foundation will challenge and extend the role of social marketing in social change.

We argue that marketing education should routinely include units, content, class activities, and assessments that relate to CSM, and indeed more generally to marketing for social change. Rather than the current norm of social marketing subjects being offered as an elective, often in the later years of a degree, we call for CSM perspectives to be included in foundational first year ‘Marketing 101’ units; introduced through weekly topic content, case studies, and assessment tasks. Furthermore, we identify the need for compulsory, stand-alone, social marketing units (working from a critical perspective), across the entire span of a degree programme. These units could be placed alongside other pertinent marketing and society subjects such as Marketing Ethics, Social Responsibility, Critical Marketing, Sustainable Marketing, Race and Marketing, and Marketing and Gender, that would form important pillars in redesigned marketing degree programmes. Furthermore, the teaching of CSM units could also make links to the ideas taught in these other units, creating synergies in pedagogy, teaching practice and the learning experience of students. CSM could also be integrated across other elements of the marketing curriculum, through the inclusion of social marketing cases, examples, and methods, for example in units such as international marketing, services marketing, and consumer behaviour. Existing social marketing units taught around the world would also benefit from engaging with the CSM agenda, foregrounding critical social theory that moves us beyond the normative core marketing principles and frameworks used to effect behaviour and social change.

There are also opportunities to move beyond the marketing discipline through the inclusion of CSM units as a key component of degree courses in behavioural sciences and behaviour change. Social marketing could be taught in such courses alongside social psychology, anthropology, human geography, public health, behavioural economics, and political science units, which are all designed with a behaviour and ‘social change for social good’ focus. This would help move beyond the current siloed thinking within disciplines and would align with the orientation of supranational organisations, such as the WHO, towards the adoption of a transdisciplinary behavioural sciences approach (Carrasco et al., 2021).

Following the lead of Tadajewski (2016) and Kapetanaki and Spotswood (2021), we also identify that there will be a practical need to develop appropriate CSM teaching content including course subject, topic and content matter, class activities, assessments, reading lists, and case studies. Such pedagogical tools could draw upon foundational critical social theories such as decolonial theories, Indigenous theories, intersectionality, critical race theory, neo-Marxism, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, reflexivity, assemblage thinking, and theories of practice. Reading lists could then draw from these foundations, as well as from the growing corpus of CSM research now being published.

Case studies, course and topic content, class activities and assessments could also be shared through forums such as CSM workshops, blogs, and forums – activities that have already been emerging in recent years. Examples of such content that we have developed ourselves include a case study on the film The Final Quarter, which focused on how the Aboriginal Australian sports star Adam Goodes was hounded out of the Australian Rules Football League due to racist abuse, encouraging learners to consider the social problem of racism against Indigenous peoples. We have also developed assessment tasks, which challenge student groups to design social marketing programmes to tackle climate change or gender equality, that incorporate intersectional and decolonising perspectives, and encourage students to engage in critically reflexive thinking. There are countless possibilities to develop such teaching content and we encourage social marketers, as well as marketing educators more broadly, to engage in this process. Future research questions regarding CSM education might include:

• RQ: How can we encourage social marketing educators to incorporate CSM perspectives into their teaching?

• RQ: What should constitute appropriate and fit-for-purpose CSM reading lists, case studies, class activities, and assessment tasks?

• RQ: How can critical perspectives in social marketing be best embedded throughout more socially minded marketing degree programmes?

• RQ: How can we best educate and prepare social marketing practitioners to do good through engaging them with CSM pedagogy?

Conclusion

In this editorial, we have positioned the papers in this special section in the context of the common critiques of social marketing, within the current landscape of CSM, and within the context of challenges and priorities contextualised by (post-)pandemic society. Building on the included papers, we have called for critical reflexivity as a crucial part of social marketing and we have revisited the role of CSM to advance understanding of the way social marketing can contribute to achieving social change, whilst attending to key issues that include market power, decolonisation, empowerment, vulnerability, and de-individualisation. Furthermore, we have enriched this extant understanding by developing an advanced agenda and by contributing research questions designed to advance the CSM field into the future.

We have argued that core issues in CSM should include attending to differences, overlaps and shared perspectives and goals across marketing and society scholarship; attending to power and politics in research, behaviour and social change; attending to a contextualised understanding of vulnerability as a way of framing social change and intervention; attending to and adopting an intersectional perspective that recognises how personal, social, cultural, and political identities intersect and produce and reproduce power, privilege, oppression, and social injustice; and exploring conceptual and ethical advantages of a sociocultural perspective in social marketing. This agenda is complemented by our reflections on the role of teaching social marketing and CSM, which will lay the foundations for a sustainable field of reflexive social marketing scholarship and practice.

The agenda we set out for the future of CSM scholarship does not lose sight of the applied nature of social marketing and the goal of achieving social change for the betterment of society. Indeed, the need for programmes fostering positive social change remains as clear as ever. We have illuminated how inequalities of health, wealth and wellbeing cut through populations, reinforcing, and widening socio-economic divisions. The pandemic has further triggered job losses, food insecurity and has meant restricted access to health and care services have affected people vastly differently. Social marketing is needed to drive people to screening services for cancer and other diseases, to engage with mental and physical ill-health prevention services, and to engage excluded populations to overcome inequalities in access to active leisure. It is also needed to foster social, financial, and digital inclusion and reduce loneliness, as well as to reduce the stigma of seeking food and financial social support. It is needed to foster collective engagement with nature, and drive environmental protective behaviours, support sustainable shopping habits, and to move towards a consumer culture in which striving for sustainability is the norm. Social marketing and CSM remain vibrant, essential areas of marketing scholarship that pose, and seek the innovations to answer, critical questions of marketing for social change.

To end, we would like to acknowledge the excellent and thought-provoking contributions from each of the authors appearing in this special section. We also thank them for their patience and perseverance during a challenging period for all because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks also to those who submitted papers that were unsuccessful for their interest in this special section. We sincerely wish them the best with their research. Huge thanks must also go to the peer reviewers, who diligently provided constructive feedback on the manuscripts submitted for this special section. Their feedback and guidance played an important role in improving the quality of the work that has been published. We know that providing peer reviews can seem like a thankless task, but this vital academic service is invaluable to our academic community. Thank you also to the research participants featured in the special section manuscripts. The academic insights presented here are only possible with their participation. Finally, a huge thanks to the Journal of Marketing Management team, the support of the editor Professor Mark Tadajewski, and the hard work and dedication of the editorial office team members Fiona Lees and Anne Foy. We hope you enjoy the papers in this special section.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).