To this end, we acknowledge the extant criticisms of social marketing – for being unethical (Laczniak & Michie, Citation1979), lacking reflexivity (Tadajewski & Brownlie, Citation2008), being power agnostic (Brace-Govan, Citation2015), being neoliberally oriented (Moor, Citation2011), being culturally insensitive and imperialist (Pfeiffer, Citation2004), being pseudo-participatory (Tadajewski et al., Citation2014) and for responsibilising the individual (Crawshaw, Citation2012). 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, Citation2018), 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.

M. Bilal Akbar1 · Elizabeth Barnes

The framework comprises 6 key stages. Each building on the insights of the previous and each with its own objectives, tools and resources: 1. What - are the target behaviours? 2. Who - should we focus our resource on? 3. Why - do/don’t those people manifest the target behaviours? 4. How - can we empower people to change? 5. So What? To what extent were our interventions effective? 6. What Now? How do we apply our learnings at scale?

This commentary argues that social marketing and the application of behavioural sciences to policy constitute two converging paths towards better policies. It highlights points of convergence and divergence between both disciplines and the potential benefits of further embedding social marketing principles and methods within the recent trend of applying behavioural sciences to policy.

We applied a Hidden Markov Model* (see Figure 1) to examine how and why behaviours did or did not change. The longitudinal repeated measure design meant we knew about food waste behaviour at two points (the amount of food wasted before and after the program), changes in the amount of food wasted reported over time for each household (more or less food wasted) and other factors (e.g. self-efficacy). By using a new method we could extend our understanding beyond the overall effect (households in the Waste Not Want Not program group wasted less food after participating when compared to the control group).

If you want to encourage a behaviour, make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely (EAST). These four simple principles, based on the Behavioural Insights Team’s own work and the wider academic literature, form the heart of the team’s new framework for applying behavioural insights.