Blog 6: Put people in the frame

We encourage you to share this blog privately with your trusted professional network of health promotion peers. However, we would request that you don’t share it on LinkedIn or other publicly accessible social media channels, which could be visible to representatives from unhealthy industry groups.

Do hamburgers sign sponsorship deals? Do grains of salt play hide and seek?  Do documents have the ability to speak?

No, of course not. But all too often people working in health promotion use messaging that implies inanimate objects have the ability to do things we normally associate with human beings.

Here are a few examples of this drawn from an analysis we conducted in 2019 of health promotion messaging:

“Where is the salt hiding?”

“There is increasing community concern regarding the high prevalence of junk food sponsorship of Australian sport.”

“The analysis illustrated how the advertising codes that claim to protect children from junk food advertising had resolutely failed.”

What is missing from all of the quotes above is any reference to actual people. In linguistics we call sentences like this ‘inagentive’. That is, these quotes fail to reference any human agents.

In the real world, of course, it is people who actually do things. Salt can’t insert itself into food – it needs people to do that. Junk food can’t decide to sponsor an AFL club, but people who profit from selling junk food can. And while documents can have claims written into them by humans, they can’t actually make any independent claims themselves.

So let’s re-write those quotes again, but this time make sure that people and the organisations they work through are put back into the frame:

“Where are they hiding the salt?”

“There is increasing community concern regarding the unhealthy food industry’s use of Australian sport to market their products.”

“The analysis revealed how marketers in the unhealthy food industry were ignoring their own advertising code and continuing to bombard children with ads.”

The quotes above are now agentive – they reference human agents.

Why does this matter? In short, because agentive language is more impactful. One of the reasons for this is  it makes clear who is responsible for the problem or the solution by ensuring they are clearly in the frame. Inagentive language, on the other hand, tends to hide the actors responsible – leaving your audience unclear as to where to direct their anger or calls for change.

It’s hard to build public support for holding the food industry to a higher standard, for example, if they don’t think the food industry is doing anything wrong.

The other reason for using more agentive messaging is it helps people believe that change is possible. Because if people are doing things that create the problem (like hiding salt in food) then surely if they stop doing those things the problem will go away.

Of course, when putting people back into the frame, it’s important to put the right people in the right places. We’ve covered this in a previous blog we wrote about the importance of ‘externalising the problem’ - framing external agents as responsible for the barrier to good health rather than individual choice.

Now more than ever, people need hope that better health is possible and clarity as to how to bring that about. So stop blaming salt and hamburgers for the problems of the world and start putting people back into the frame.

Want more information?

Visit www.commoncause.com.au to learn more about Common Cause Australia’s work and the concept behind values-based messaging.

Contact Mark Chenery on [email protected] if you have further questions about this work.