Social Marketing and Health

Health marketing has always been an area that I have been interested in,  it amazes me how marketers can take a product and make the public believe that what they are consuming is "healthy". A good example of this is Kind Bars. Although they are packaged to look and seem like a granola bar, they are not much better than a snickers bar. It does not stop at granola bars, this extends into the yogurt aisle too, many of the yogurts we would think of as a good healthy choice, are filled with added sugar. If you would like more information on the "Kind Bar Controversy" CNN Money wrote an interesting article explaining how the FDA is trying to limit this type of misconception.  

Along with how our food is packaged, it is also to consider social marketing campaigns surrounding health. In class, Debbie Kibbe came to speak to our class about social marketing. Kibbe works with the Georgia Health Policy Center and has years of experience in the field, including working with the American Diabetic Association. 

When she first entered our classroom, she asked us to fill out a note card. First, listing the slogan of a for-profit brand and the particular name of the brand. Then we were asked to do the same thing, just for a non-profit campaign. At first, I was stumped. I did not have difficulty with the first slogan writing down the slogan for goldfish "The Snack that Smiles Back!". However, I could not come up with a second slogan. I thought that this was interesting, and it made me think, how closely do I pay attention to social marketing campaigns? 

In the class discussion, we had to come up with our own campaign and decide how 
to persuade a group of people to change their health behavior. My group personally chose "Use Sunscreen" as our campaign topic. It was hard to come up with a slogan and even determine what population we should address. We used the following questions from the Social Marketing National Excellence Collaborative's book, "Social Marketing Basics". 

 

There are ten strategic questions that you can use to help work toward an initial marketing plan. These are:

1.   What is the social [or health] problem I want to address?

2.   What actions do I believe will best address that problem?

3.   Who is being asked to take that action? (audience)

4.   What does the audience want in exchange for adopting this new behavior?

5.   Why will the audience believe that anything we offer is real and true?

6.   What is the competition offering? Are we offering something the audience wants more?

7.   What is the best time and place to reach members of our audience so that they are the most disposed to receiving the intervention?

8.   How often, and from whom, does the intervention need to be received if it is to work?

9.   How can I integrate a variety of interventions to act, over time, in a coordinated manner, to influence the behavior?

10.  Do I have the resources to carry out this strategy alone; and if not, where can I find useful partners?

So some of the challenges that we faced was finding a good audience for our message and finding a way to communicate our message across to the audience. We ended up deciding that our audience would be Georgia Farmers and that we should use a magazine campaign, since this would be the most effective. 

Even though our activity was only a simulation, it gave us an idea of how difficult it was for those in social marketing to get their message across. This activity highlighted how it is truly hard to reach certain populations and encourage them to change their health behaviors!