The world of health communications and social marketing has taken another turn in the road at the CDC. The website for the new National Center for Health Marketing (NCHM), an article in Preventing Chronic Disease and briefings at various conferences the past few months have been introducing the term “health marketing.” What is meant is creating, communicating, and delivering health information and interventions using consumer-centered and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations. Health marketing uses the science and strategies of commercial marketing to promote its products, namely, evidence-based health information and interventions. Still, people ask...
Since the introduction of health communications at CDC in 1993, the practice of health communications and social marketing has bloomed (disclosure: I was the Project Director for the first agency-wide support contract in this area). Yet, in the midst of a reorganization at the CDC, the NCHM was created and the question I have heard many times is – what is it? And how is it different from social marketing and health communications?
I’m not going to try to climb into the heads of the people who make such semantic distinctions, but the mission of the Center gives me the strongest clue: …protect and promote health and advance CDC’s goals through innovative health marketing programs, products, and services that are consumer-centered, high impact, and science based. I conclude that they are not going to be in the behavior, environment or social change business – they are going to emulate their commercial marketing and international social marketing colleagues and create goods and services to market with a reinvigorated corps of intermediaries and partners.
The NCHM’s core functions are: customer and market research, product production and packaging, product distribution and customer relationship management. They have taken the marketing ideas to heart, but unfortunately seem to be the leaving the ‘social’ elements behind (…[social] marketing techniques are the bridging mechanisms between the simple possession of knowledge and the socially useful implementation of that knowledge). There has always been a cadre of people who have believed that ‘social marketing’ is not what these agencies are in the business of doing. The arguments include: We are science-based organizations, not change agents. Social marketing programs take too long to plan, are too big and too expensive in these days of reduced budgets. We can leverage our relationships with partners to do more with less – if we just give them the right tools and know-how. How do we know that social marketing really works?
All fair positions to take, if not completely accurate. Government policy making is the biggest instrument of change in any society: leaving change to chance in not an option. Social marketing programs come in all shapes and sizes – it’s a way of thinking about population health, not a recipe book (as much as some people try to make it one). Partners are even more stretched with fewer resources than the Federal agencies, especially when you look at trying to implement health promotion and disease prevention programs at the state and local level. And the National Social Marketing Centre has been able to compile quite a list of evidence reviews (let alone what gets covered In The News).
Maybe the NCHM will become a focused effort to confront a problem many of us in this business lament: there is more good science about what works than there is science and resources to systematically apply it to addressing public health problems (bringing it to scale). These ‘dissemination gaps’ between what is published in the professional journals and what gets practiced in the field have begged for attention for decades. Is bringing more marketing expertise to dissemination necessary? Absolutely! Is a methodical process to revamping the way the CDC – and other HHS agencies – prioritize and fund dissemination applications (and not more research into the process) important? Absolutely!
Whether it’s called health marketing or something else may be beside the point right now. What remains to be seen is whether the NCHM makes good on the (implied) promise: bringing marketing to all aspects of the public health enterprise from research and development activities to dissemination trials to national implementation.
However, I do have to comment on this closing statement in the PCD article: “Like the application of marketing to public health, NCHM is in its early days.” Well, if 20 years of experience makes this ‘the early days,’ than so be it. I hope that the staff at the NCHM read and learn a little from the experience of marketing and communications at CDC as well as in the broader framework of public health before thinking they are starting from scratch. I suggest The Marketing of Ideas and Social Issues by Seymour Fine (1981), Marketing Health Behavior (1984; Frederiksen, Solomon & Brehony), Manoff’s Social Marketing: New Imperative for Public Health (1985), Social Marketing and Public Health Intervention by myself and June Flora (1988), Social Marketing by Kotler & Roberto (1989), and a chapter on Social Marketing by Novelli (1990). And in the last 15 years social marketing research and practice has exploded, with a nearly five-fold increase in articles appearing in professional journals from 1999-2004.
And here’s an old definition of ‘health marketing’ I dug up (p.302): Health marketing refers to health promotion programs that are designed to satisfy consumer needs, strategized to reach as broad an audience as is in need of the program, and thereby enhance the organization’s ability to effect population-wide changes in targeted risk behaviors.
Semantics and tactics aside, let’s all keep our eye on the goal posts.
technorati tags: CDC, Health_Communication, Health_Marketing, Information_Dissemination, Social_Marketing
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