Jamie Oliver’s recipe for change

Jamie Oliver’s new series, Ministry of Food, has been running for a few weeks now and has predictably polarised opinion – about Jamie himself, as well as about the way the series has exposed the underbelly of working class eating and cooking habits. 

The media has castigated and lauded Ministry of Food in fairly equal measure, but the series has definitely succeeded in a fundamental way – to get people talking about the state of our food culture in the UK.  And having learnt a few lessons from his school dinners series (which helped unlock £500 million extra government funding for school meals) Jamie is ‘coming out’ even more strongly as a food campaigner with Ministry of Food.  The Pass It On campaign linked to the series has the ambitious aim of changing the way the nation cooks and eats. 

But what happens when the last programme is finished, and the eyes of media and opinion formers move on?  Will sales of fast food plummet as we rediscover the joy of cooking with fresh ingredients, or will Ministry of Food be remembered for its depressing exposure of an unstoppable decline in our eating habits?  Making sure that the series is more than a flash in the pan will take much more clout than even Jamie Oliver can muster on his own.

The catalyst for real momentum and longevity in any campaign is the extent to which people and organisations with a stake in the issue commit to the long, slow, difficult challenge of creating genuine, deep seated shifts in opinion and behaviour – step by painful step.

This isn’t a problem unique to the Ministry of Food – or to celebrity-led campaigns.  It’s a thorny issue for more traditional campaigns from NGOs too (what will happen to Friends of the Earth’s successful Big Ask campaign now that the Climate Change Bill is - almost - in the bag?)

No single route can provide all the answers to any major social challenge: political lobbying, PR, advocacy, media and public awareness campaigns all have a role to play.  But one approach that shouldn’t be overlooked is social marketing – the emerging discipline of using techniques from conventional marketing to influence people’s lifestyle choices and behaviour.  Within the public health sector, faced with the seemingly intractable problem of trying to persuade people to make practical, positive changes to their lifestyles, many public sector organisations are turning to social marketing and beginning to see positive results on issues ranging from sexual health to obesity and smoking.

At its heart, social marketing identifies the psychological and practical barriers to change on a specific issue among a specific audience, as well as incentives and benefits, and develops a ‘proposition’ and set of interventions to engage people in step by step change on the basis of self interest – rather than altruism.  This may not be language that Jamie Oliver would recognise, but his campaign contains a classic example of a social marketing intervention: the Rotherham Food Centre in the heart of the town’s shopping centre, where people can come and watch cooking demos, take cooking classes, and simply talk about food and cooking.  Taking marketing out to street level, creating a ‘shop window’ for the issue, and building education and peer support into the intervention are all classic social marketing techniques.

At the moment, social marketing is riding high in public health campaigns, where the evidence base for its effectiveness is growing week by week.  But, as behaviour change on issues like energy efficiency, sustainable transport and civic engagement moves up the agenda, social marketing will start to find its niche as an important campaigning approach across a spectrum of issues, and with voluntary organisations, charities and NGOs as well the public sector. 

Meanwhile, social marketers should be checking out Jamie’s Pass It On campaign to add some zest to their recipes for positive social change.