« Malnutrition is a Social Marketing Issue | Main | Interview with Steve Rubel »

05 March 2006

Searching for the Nexus

Social marketers and creative directors are often looking for insights into how to make connections between multiple behaviors to keep messages single-minded and promote behaviors that are relevant to the audience's reality. In obesity prevention programs, for example, we have found that one way to link the ideas of 'eating better' and 'being more active' is by focusing on the benefit that doing both 'gives you more energy'. Unfortunately, the scientists are not too pleased with the idea of 'more energy' as a benefit for a campaign because the scientific research for such a claim is weak.

Chocolatemilk For people who are trying to prevent the development of osteoporosis, especially by encouraging young girls and tweens to both consume more calcium and engage in more weight-bearing physical activity, the latest news may seem like an answer to prayers.

A new study from Indiana University concludes that athletes who drink chocolate milk after an intense bout of exercise are able to workout longer and with more power during a second workout, compared to athletes who drink commercial sports beverages [link to story].

However, in a nonrandom survey of people who occasionally or usually engage in various types of physical activity, the idea of drinking milk after a workout was - let's say - unpalatable.  Lesson: science does not trump consumer reality either! The trick is learning to balance the scientific claims with the audience perspective. Was Yoo-Hoo ahead of its time? And stay tuned for more calcium-fortified soft drinks in the months ahead - product solutions to one aspect of the behavior change equation.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted at 03:35 PM in Audience Insights |

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

Your Information

(Name is required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

About

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Categories

A Few of My Publications

  • Health communication campaigns to drive demand for evidence-based practices and reduce stigma in the HEALing communities study
    Describes the development of five communication campaigns that focused on naloxone, MOUD, and stigma reduction as part of a community intervention study (n=65) to reduce opioid deaths.
  • Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools For Improving Health, Well-Being, and the Environment
    This book weaves together multi-level theories of change, research and case studies to explain and illustrate the development of social marketing to address some of society’s most vexing problems. The result is a people-centered approach that relies on insight and empathy as much as on data for the inspiration, design and management of programs that strive for changes for good. “This is it -- the comprehensive, brainy road map for tackling wicked social problems. It’s all right here: how to create and innovate, build and implement, manage and measure, scale up and sustain programs that go well beyond influencing individual behaviors, all the way to broad social change in a world that needs the help."
  • SAGE: Social Marketing: Six-Volume Series
    Bringing together seminal texts from diverse sources, this six-volume set organizes the field of social marketing, highlights its global scope and empirical contributions, and present its current growth and dynamism. Each volume addresses specific themes: conceptual frameworks and common ground, social marketing in the developed world, social marketing in developing countries, applications for sustainable behavior and environmental protection, and deepening and expanding its impact.
  • An integrative model for social marketing
    The model pulls together social marketing ideas and practices from the diversity of settings in which they have been developed and allows practitioners and academics to use a common set of concepts to think about and design social marketing programs. The model gives social marketers more latitude in how to use price and place in the design of programs and how to approach social change and public health in the years ahead through market‐based reform.
  • Transformative social marketing: Co-creating the social marketing discipline and brand
    The paper reviews new insights and understandings from modern social marketing practice, social innovation, design thinking and service design, social media, transformative consumer research, marketing theory and advertising practice to develop a model for transforming social marketing thought, research and practice.
  • The new technology: The consumer as participant rather than target audience
    The original argument against social marketers having "target audiences."
  • Consumer-based health communication
    The foundational work behind the creative brief as used today.
  • Social marketing and public health intervention
    The first widely cited article on using marketing for public health programs that focused on its application in community approaches to preventing heart disease. The essential principles still hold.
My Photo