Back in 2015, Grant McCracken published a blog post describing the prospective president “as a fireship.” Published a year before Election Night 2016, McCracken drew a historical metaphor to demonstrate how these ships were used as rapid incendiary naval weapons used to explode on impact. Nearly 10 years after the post was published, this metaphor still applies.
For social marketers engaging in public policy work, the start of the second administration has sown chaos in both political, economic, and market spheres. US government agencies have suffered whiplash from blanket funding pauses through Executive Orders and then reinstatement through court orders, which are allegedly being ignored. The administration then pivoted to targeting certain types of research. Entire government executive agencies have been shuttered, while cabinet level departments are considered for elimination. And lest the challenges of authoritarianism be discussed only at the federal level, state-level initiatives move to curtail academic freedoms as well. The American Bar Association has gone so far as to rebuke constitutional uncertainty by recently reaffirming its support for the “rule of law”— a basic principle of a constitutional republic.
A 2022 article by Andrews et al. in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) builds a robust definition of what and how marketing and public policy intersect. As they describe, public policy deals with “problems, processes, policies, procedures, and/or protocols” related to a number of marketplace and social impact areas, such as “consumer protection; antitrust and competition policy; vulnerability research; diversity, equity, and inclusion research; nutrition labeling; addiction, cannabis, and antidrug research; tobacco warning labeling and education; and privacy and technology research.” Given the intersection of social marketing and public policy in the US runs through both markets (where neoliberalism yields market self-regulation as the dominant approach) and government (where regulators at government agencies act as public servants to apply and enforce existing laws), political shifts– especially to extremes– significantly impact the work we do. The result is that US-based social marketing scholarship needs to be far more agile in the face of uncertainty around the state of public policy.
Understanding this necessity relies on the context of historical, political, and even legal precedents that merge public policy with social marketing. For example, in 1984, the US Supreme Court decided in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council that federal agencies could use their own regulatory expertise to reasonably interpret statutory ambiguity.1 This precedent became known as the “Chevron deference” and informed jurisprudence over 70,000 cases over a 40-year span. For social marketing and public policy makers, this precedent has implied the importance of developing agency expertise– whether at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), etc– that is informed by both praxis and research. For scholars, our work is meaningful and relevant when it informs the regulatory expertise of those in charge of developing and executing public policy in the marketplace. This is, after all, why highlighting implications for marketers and policy makers is critical to journals such as the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Affairs, and so on.
However, in 2024, the US Supreme Court decided in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that, instead of regulatory body expertise, statutory ambiguity would be subject to court ruling. In overturning 40 years of US Supreme Court precedent with respect to the Chevron deference, SCOTUS also materially changed the significance of US-based social marketing research. It’s not that research findings were invalidated, but rather that the purpose and applicability of such research is radically altered. The old assumptions no longer apply.
For example, a recent 2024 JPP&M piece by Groß and Vriens highlighting issues with multi-level marketing companies gives consistent consideration of FTC regulators throughout the piece, including an analysis of the FTC’s various safeguard policies. A 2017 article by Perry and Blumenthal discusses the need for the CFPB to engage in more testing on the readability of mandatory mortgage loan disclosures. And a 2023 article by Gonzales et al. informs how consumer perceptions of “health halos” of plant-based meat alternatives could inform Food & Drug Administration (FDA) requirements for consumer labeling. Yet, in needing to disregard old assumptions about federal agencies, it remains to be seen how such policies hold up. Indeed, a recent Harvard Law Review essay suggests complete uncertainty of how the courts will uphold stare decisis of past regulatory decisions, post-Loper Bright, in the new administration.
The question over how past agency interpretations could inform future judicial interpretations of statutes assumes regulatory agencies will persist according to the status quo. This assumption dismisses the immediate chaotic changes to the civil service. On the evening of Saturday, February 8, the newly-confirmed Director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the CFPB effectively set the agency’s budget to zero and closed the offices. By Monday afternoon, the National Treasury Employees Union brought a lawsuit against Vought to block the CFPB’s closure. The CFPB, which has recovered more than $20 billion in consumer relief since 2011, sits at the center of marketing and public policy work, yet has found itself a pawn in political battles over government’s role in markets. These battles are both politically (e.g., libertarian questions over the size and role of government) and personally (e.g., strongman weaponization of bureaucracy) ideological.
However, it’s not just legal uncertainty where social marketing and public policy work is challenged; it’s market conditions as well. For example, the back and forth tariff war between the US and Colombia that occurred over the span of about 10 hours one Sunday (only to end up with a PR “win” but no bilateral policy change) not only rocked markets, but left consumers uncertain if they would find their morning coffee costing 25% more over the course of the next week. Economists can describe supply and demand under scarcity, but marketers have deeper insights into stakeholder value exchange. In particular, as fragmented media ecosystems pitch different ideological realities to consumers, policy outcomes change as well.
A bifurcated electorate leading to a bifurcated (or trifurcated) marketplace of choice will radically impact policy priorities. For example, the administration used Executive Order to attempt to eliminate private DEI programs, subverting scores of work published in journals such as JPP&M, the Journal for Consumer Research, Psychology & Marketing, and so on. In the current context where a presidential advisory committee with questionable constitutional authority is rapidly radically altering the structures of government, a judiciary has an ideological supermajority at the high court, and the majority in both chambers of the legislature have been generally permissive of the executive actions (advancing cabinet nominees with stated ideological goals), prior and pending social marketing and public policy work will require a rethink about how it informs praxis going forward.
Decades of social marketing and public policy work in the US context have assumed democratic republicanism as the basic status quo that underlies the findings of the work. In a way, this has allowed for policy (that government uses to address societal goals) to remain agnostic of politics (the ability to wield power that affects governance). Yet a rewrite of the norms and institutions under (a) new social contract(s) reshapes the relevancy of social marketing and public policy work. In order to maintain relevance going forward, this type of work must become resilient to illiberalism, whether at state or local levels2. The politics of neoliberalism in a capitalist market with democracy or authoritarian traits are constantly in tension.
The past +40 years were an ideological push/pull for social marketing and public policy in the US, but largely a pax marcatus, if you will. That’s no longer the case. The fireship sailed right into it and our scholarship needs to adapt to these dynamics– fast.
- The case referred to a dispute over the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of a “source” of air pollution. ↩︎
- See Behnke (2024) on polycentric governance ↩︎
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