The surge of interest in developing social marketing programs for obesity prevention (and reduction) at the community, state and national levels will unleash a lot of creativity, and a lot of “me too,” when it comes to defining priority audiences. Hopefully, many program designers will quickly move beyond simple demographics and begin mapping behaviors that are important to the prevention of childhood obesity. When these exercises are done, PARENTS will loom large in people’s thinking about potential audiences. Here are two resources to consider when thinking about this group of people.
The report of the Healthy Lifestyles and Disease Prevention Campaign (Small Steps) identifies a group of parents they describe as “Family Builders:” adults 25-49 years old with children under the age of 18 living at home. These Family Builders are a subset of a larger group termed “Jaded Can’t Doers” – adult men and women of all races and ethnicities who may or may not be overweight, want to incorporate healthier behaviors into their life, but without drastically changing their lifestyle. They need to be convinced that a healthier lifestyle is indeed possible. The campaign estimates that this segment comprises 36% of the US population. Read more about the campaign and its communication strategies at the Small Step website.A recent report in Pediatrics by Rhee and colleagues documented that parents of overweight or obese children aged 2 to 12 years could be segmented by stages of change constructs with respect to their readiness to help their child lose weight (emphasis added). Though this study did not take the next step of designing specific programs aimed at parents in various stages, it does provide a useful behavioral segmentation variable to consider in thinking about interventions for parents. Note that this latter study focuses on parents as an audience that would be considered “crucial for success” for a social marketing program with the objective of reducing or preventing overweight and obesity among children. In the Small Steps campaign, the priority audience is clearly adults and more specifically those in a ‘contemplation’ or even ‘precontemplation’ frame of mind (they are not reported as giving any indication of a motivation to change their behavior within the next six months). While the rationale for targeting Family Builders as the models and reinforcers of healthier behaviors among their children is solid, the incorporation of their own readiness to help their children (Step 2 in the Segmentation post) seems to make sense here as a way of potentially increasing the effectiveness of the intervention.
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