This chapter presents a number of models useful for developing campaign strategies. These models are generally known as ‘knowledge–attitude–behaviour’ change (KAB) models or ‘social cognition’ models (Connor and Norman 2005; Godin 1994). While each can be classified as either ‘motivational’, ‘behavioural’, ‘cognitive’ or ‘affective’ in emphasis, they all deal with conceptualising the influences on behaviour, and hence provide a framework for formative research, strategy development and campaign evaluation. In general, changes in the major components in these models, such as attitudes, norms and efficacy, have been found to be good predictors of changes in behaviours and intentions (Webb and Sheeran 2006). There are a number of such models [Darnton (2008) lists and describes over thirty]. We will briefly describe each of the models most frequently mentioned in the health promotion and social marketing literature, before presenting a synthesis of the major variables across all models. We include brief discussions on two concepts generally ignored by the KAB models: morality and legitimacy (Amonini 2001). A notable omission from this chapter is Prochaska and DiClemente’s ‘Stages of Change’ model, which will be discussed in Chapter 10.

In social marketing, sponsorship is particularly important for gaining access to specific target audiences and for achieving policy changes that lead to healthier places, such as smoke-free areas and healthier food choices in entertainment and sporting venues. How this is done will be detailed below.

Perhaps one of the best known concepts in marketing is the ‘4Ps’, apparently first described by McCarthy (1960). The 4Ps have endured because they provide the four fundamentals of marketing planning and management. They refer to what the company is selling (product), where the products and services are made available to customers (place, or distribution), how products and services are priced and paid for (price), and where and how the products and services are made known to people and they are motivated to purchase them (promotion). In Chapter 2 we referred to the ‘principle of customer value’ as the sum total of the benefits provided by the ‘mix’ of these 4Ps.

Ethics is important in any area, but perhaps even more so in social marketing given the sensitivity of some issues in particular that social marketers are asked to address.

Commercial marketers have long been criticised for using allegedly unethical methods to target vulnerable populations, or simply using deceptive tactics against consumers in general. Marketing as an activity has been accused of being unethical in a number of ways (Murphy and Bloom 1990): creating greed and dissatisfaction; misleading because it doesn’t give the full picture of a product; manipulative because it persuades people to buy things they don’t need; and a waste of valuable resources that could be spent in better causes (e.g., it is said that the global Coca-Cola marketing budget could make a real difference to worldwide child poverty). Marketing is accused of focusing on selected target markets, often those that are wealthy or privileged, and neglecting others. Conversely, other marketers, such as the tobacco companies and alcohol marketers, are accused of targeting vulnerable audiences such as children, teenagers and ­socio-economically disadvantaged groups. Marketing is accused of being intrusive, in that television advertisements enter our homes, disrupting our leisure time, while billboards distract our attention on the road.

Brand cosmogony

The problem with theories is their inherent lack of evidence. In more than 100 years of social science research, the list of laws discovered is embarrassingly short, and that's a polite way of putting it. More critically minded spirits would claim that not a single law has been revealed. Brands pose the opposite problem: there is an indisputable amount of evidence without theory. Think ING. Think iPod. Think Virgin. Think Coke. Think Google.

The problem is, to paraphrase Nassim Taleb, that the minds of the gods cannot be read by witnessing their deeds. The generator of reality is different from this reality itself. What we see on shelves in supermarkets as brands is not what went into the making of them. Similarly, truth does not reside somehow inside things but in knowledge we harbour about those things. This begs some questions: How do we know about brands? How do we think of brands? What does our cosmogony of brands look like?

The story of Menocchio sheds some light, albeit a strobe light, on these questions. Menocchio was born in the small hill town of Montereale, located in the Friuli region of north-eastern Italy. On 28 September 1583, when Menocchio was 52 years old, he was accused by the Holy Office of heresy. At the heart of the allegation was Menocchio's strange cosmogony.

Market economy

Before we analyse the way brands are manufactured, it might be helpful to briefly describe the economic context in which they circulate. The next two sections will take the scenic route past the economic backdrop against which brands take shape. We will use Michel Callon's notion of economy of qualities to set the scene. Of course, if you're in a hurry (or if you're Michel Callon), feel free to jump straight to the section on advertising practice.

How are brands brought into existence and how are they institutionalized? What roles to they play in the contemporary market economy? If brands are about interaction between individuals, organizations and society, how do they relate to our economy, which is based on transactions?

In many respects, Thomas Hobbes' theory of social and political order sets the scene for our argument. He paints a picture of a bi-polar world in which either order, civility, sovereignty and rule flourish, or a state of chaos prevails in which homo homini lupus est ‘and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

Hobbes atomizes society into individual actors, who are nothing but calculating machines driven solely by self-interest. This reckless pursuit of individual interests creates, on a societal level, total disorder. According to this logic, salvation can only be achieved if everybody cedes their individual powers to a Leviathan, a kind of benevolent dictator-state.

Large Glass

Marshall McLuhan proposed to understand art as ‘exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties’. Indeed, art did prepare us for what was about to come. At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists in Paris and New York were exposed to the golden days of the machine age. While impressionists had deconstructed the world, and expressionists decentered the subject, Picasso was about to break up both in favour of assemblages. But nobody else would come close to one artist's diagrammatic yet precise anticipation of the brand society as Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was obsessed with machines. His early works such as Coffee Mill (1911) or Chocolate Grinder (1914) resemble product descriptions of machines: they do not show (however distorted or abstracted) objects or forms but describe a mechanism. These paintings show how things work: they explore machines that produce; they are diagrams of production. This approach reflected (quite literally) the daily grind of a society that had turned itself into industrial mass-production mode.

Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was born out of the same zeitgeist as the motion studies of Étienne-Jules Marey's photographic analysis of movement of people, birds or a galloping horse. Marey quite literally shot his ‘animated zoo’ with a photographic gun that would inspire the motion studies of Frank B. and Lillian Gilbreth and, later, Frederic W. Taylor's Scientific Management. For Duchamp, this was only half of the truth.

Proposition

Brands are a fait accompli. They are much exploited, but little explored. This book is about rectifying the ratio between exploiting and exploring through sketching out a theory of the brand society.

Why the brand society? On the most basic level, brands are a phenomenon that links and reorganizes the two fundamental spheres of production and consumption, which have been separated since the Industrial Revolution. Brands fundamentally transform how we manage an organization's identity, how we think of its culture and how we organize innovation. Simultaneously, brands transform the politics, the ethics and the aesthetics of consumption. Brands traverse society on the diagonal: following them means moving sideways, from production to consumption, from management to lifestyle, and back. Following this movement, the book turns into a treasure-hunt map rather than a surveyor's chart that measures a well-known, established territory.

Where to start? The good thing is that everybody experiences brands as part of their lives. That's also the problem: the things that are closest to us are often the most mysterious and unknown. When I started thinking about brands, I thought of products. Then, I tried to see them as images, as packaging, as a way of dressing things up that is certainly costly, maybe manipulative, but ultimately inconsequential because it's superficial. It was a thought by Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood that, for me, suddenly turned brands into something else, something more: ‘Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a non-verbal medium for the human creative faculty.’

Brand = behaviour

Brands, we have argued, are organized heresy: they ensure the continuous importing of differences into the inner sanctum of the organization. There, at the inner sanctum, the brand meets the people who work for the organization. Organizational members are increasingly understood as prime opportunities to express the brand. The idea is simple: the brand experience of consumers is dependent on the way they are treated by organizational members. Hence, so the story goes, the brand equals the behaviour of staff. This chapter analyses how brands write themselves into organizational behaviour and culture. We propose a simple argument: in a service economy, organizations rely on people to make their customers happy. The brand is not built around the product but around the employees who deliver the service and (ideally) create a memorable experience.

Cindy Carpenter heads marketing and HR at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, one of Australia's leading law firms with around 1,000 employees. Before taking on this dual role, she was a brand manager at Unilever, finished her MBA at Wharton and worked for thirteen years as a strategist with the Boston Consulting Group.

Cindy's portfolio heralds the advent of a new era for brand managers. In the context of a professional services firm, the brand is developed and delivered through employees.

‘The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’

Thus did Samuel Johnson head the final chapter of his novel Rasselas. Will we be able to offer you much more? At the end of our odyssey through several disciplines and traditions, can we draw up some take-away implications, packaged up conveniently in bullet-point form?

As Jean-Luc Godard famously said, a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order. You will have drawn some conclusions from the introduction of this book and formed an opinion after the first couple of pages. Love letters and good books share this uncontrollable, viral and contagious flow of meaning. So while you hopefully have used this book as a ladder to get somewhere where the book cannot get to, and climbed beyond it (to use Wittgenstein's famous metaphor from his Tractatus), we'd like to step back to the three main concepts of this book – brands, management and lifestyle – and offer some speculations about their future evolution. Please note that this narrative has not been derived from staring into a crystal ball; rather than clairvoyance, the following represents only one of many possible conjectures.

Lifestyle

At the beginning of our journey, we argued that brands form a mountain range of evidence in search of a theory. Brands are pervasive and ubiquitous. We take them for granted – from pop art to McDonald's, from Starbucks to Greenpeace, brands are the mechanism that connects organizations and people.

Two schools of thought

Most ethical debates are framed around two opposing schools of thought. On the one hand, there is liberal philosophy with its focus on freedom, the private and the individual; on the other there is a more loosely connected set of ideas that advocate society, the common good and justice. In the world of business, the liberal tradition, with its ideology of free markets leading to all other freedoms, including democracy and personal freedom, dominates the debate. The brand plays an important role in the defence of free-market principles: brands create accountability, loyalty and wealth for everybody. In other words, brands liberate. The more critical tradition sees brands as part of the problem, not the solution. Brands are the lubricants of free-markets in which the consumer mentality bulldozes all other forms of life. Brands are the avant-garde of the capitalist quest for world domination, spearheading the invasion of culture and privacy (or what's left of it).

The two schools are implacably opposed. When people talk about ethics, they normally join one or the other camp. Their arguments miss each other, like ships passing in the night. The problem is that if you judge each tradition by its own criteria, both are right. They both present fairly cohesive, closed logical systems that make sense from the inside.

The Deloitte brand

Usually, when I meet David Redhill over breakfast at Bondi Beach, he is just coming back from an early-morning surf. I am not sure how many senior partners of global accounting firms surf, but David seems to be an exception in many ways. It starts with his rather eclectic background: he was born in Singapore, has Russian ancestors, worked in London, Barcelona, San Francisco and New York, and now lives in Sydney, near the beach. His career is no less colourful: he was Global Head of Marketing for Landor before joining Deloitte. Landor is one of the leading global brand strategy and design consultancies. Its client list reads like a who's who of the business world, and includes Accenture, BP, Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Microsoft, Pfizer, HP among many others.

David is Chief Marketing Officer at Deloitte and a key member of a multinational team developing the Deloitte brand on a global level. For him, the move from FMCG to knowledge-intensive firms is the best thing that ever happened. ‘It is more exciting to sell ideas than dog food,’ he says. Knowledge-intensive firms such as Deloitte increasingely engage in branding, which makes it a very dynamic and challenging field: as David puts it, auditors are designed to take things apart, and being creatures of habit, this is what they do with brands and branding practices too.