Heroic political action? Voyueristic telly trash? Ill-informed hypocrisy? Jamie Oliver at it again! Reading press reviews of Jamie Oliver’s new offering, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, you can feel the critics clamouring for a box to put it in - a list of ingredients to define it. One that isn’t close to hand, but captures its significance best for us is “Prime time social marketing case study”.

Regardless of what the producers, critics or Jamie Oliver consider the rationale to be, at a fundamental level this show is about health inequalities - the urgency with which they need to be addressed and (thankfully) the intractable complex of factors that create and perpetuate them.

And whilst  Jamie Oliver and his team aren’t perhaps the most likely band of social marketers you could imagine, they are unwittingly ticking many of the boxes that characterise a solid social marketing approach in their attempts to do something about the cooking and therefore eating habits of the residents of Rotherham.

Just to head to the critics off at the pass: For us as social marketers, all arguments regarding the misrepresentation of Rotherham and the caricaturing of its residents miss the point completely. The focus on Rotherham is incidental - an expedient hook to hang the concept on - a production company’s angle to transform an abstract concept into a viable (sellable) TV show. Considering the primetime backlash to Jamie’s previous healthy eating ‘movement’ found its expression here with the mashing of burgers through school railings, this is strategy is completely understandable.

However, this show isn’t really about Rotherham, it’s about the perennial issue regarding the relationship between food and class and, to this extent, transcends the location that is its setting and even the individuals that are its subjects. Jamie’s Ministry of Food is about real families all over the UK who live on the wrong side of the health inequalities equation. To analyse this issue through a lens of media concepts (stereotyping, misrepresentation, judicious editing) is to run the risk of neuteuring the potential this show has to raise awareness a serious and enduring social issue and the ensuing debate that may result in a more effective solution.

So, what does social marketing ala Oliver consist in? Through his quasi steering group of 8 residents and ad-hoc walkabouts, he’s building an intimate understanding of his audience and letting the insight that this leads to direct the action that is taken. In this way, he’s beginning to appreciate how the real barriers to behaviour change (for the individuals involved and for the the outsiders like us trying to bring about change on their behalf) are the the socio-cultural norms and values that surround a particular behaviour in a particular subculture (be it class, region, commmunity or even family).

In terms of development, they are coming face-to-face with the complex of socio-economic factors that stand behind an individual’s apparent freewill to make the right choices (how can a person teach others to cook when they can’t afford the ingredients or can’t read the recipe?) and are having to adapt their interventions accordingly - to mould them around their audience. Their approach is developing from the realisation that giving people information on the assumption that this will lead to a rational choice and, as a matter of course, more desirable behaviour is both naive and patronising.

In terms of implementation, they understanding the importance of empowering the audience to take ownership of the issue for themselves and are leveraging the power of peer-to-peer transmission to spread the message with authenticity and create passionate champions (influencers) for the cause within the target audience.  (Jamie’s plan is to get each of his 8 participants to teach 2 people 10 recipes and for those 2 people to teach two people, and so on.) He’s even set up a drop-in centre-type intervention (the physical “Ministry of Food”) as a focal point for the campaign.

The extent to which he succeeds in his mission remains to be seen, but his intentions (and many of his methods) should be applauded. Outside the real difference it could make to the cooking/eating habits of his target audience, there could be a nice halo effect for the profile of social marketing in general. If, that is, the press commentators can sharpen the analysis, see beyond the obvious “misrepresentation” angles and tease out the real significance of this show as a prime time social marketing campaign.