Effective health communication and social marketing strategies include the following components: Use of research-based strategies to shape materials and products and to select the channels that deliver them to the intended audience. Understanding of conventional wisdom, concepts, language, and priorities for different cultures and settings.
Why community health fairs are important. Volunteers give up a Saturday to help others in the community live the healthiest lives possible. Successful fairs inspire healthy lifestyle changes. Information that prompts a change in car seat size or installation, or motivates someone to stop smoking, leads to a healthier community for everyone.
Social marketers use a wide range of health communication strategies based on mass media; they also use mediated (for example, through a healthcare provider), interpersonal, and other modes of communication; and marketing methods such as message placement (for example, in clinics), promotion, dissemination, and community level outreach.
Health Communication. Health communication includes verbal and written strategies to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices. Health communication often integrates components of multiple theories and models to promote positive changes in attitudes and behaviors.
Health communication includes verbal and written strategies to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices. Health communication often integrates components of multiple theories and models to promote positive changes in attitudes and behaviors.
Using a variety of communication channels can allow health messages to shape mass media or interpersonal, small group, or community level campaigns. Health communication strategies aim to change people's knowledge, attitudes, and/or behaviors; for example:
Assists in developing a social marketing effort to promote adoption and use of innovations related to health promotion. Describes a practical approach for planning and implementing health communication efforts and offers guidelines that can be tailored to various settings and circumstances.
Communication channels for health information have changed greatly in recent years. One-way dissemination of information has given way to a multimodal transactional model of communication . Social marketers face challenges such as increased numbers and types of health issues competing for the public's attention; limitations on people's time; and increased numbers and types of communication channels, including the internet.4A multimodal approach is the most effective way to reach audiences about health issues.5
Social marketing is widely used to influence health behaviour. Social marketers use a wide range of health communication strategies based on mass media; they also use mediated (for example, through a healthcare provider), interpersonal, and other modes of communication; and marketing methods such as message placement (for example, in clinics), promotion, dissemination, and community level outreach. Social marketing encompasses all of these strategies.
Social marketers use theory to identify behavioural determinants that can be modified. For example, social marketing aimed at obesity might use behavioural theory to identify connections between behavioural determinants of poor nutrition, such as eating habits within the family, availability of food with high calorie and low nutrient density (junk food) in the community, and the glamorisation of fast food in advertising. Social marketers use such factors to construct conceptual frameworks that model complex pathways from messages to changes in behaviour (fig 3).
In applying theory based conceptual models, social marketers again use commercial marketing strategies based on the marketing mix.2For example, they develop brands on the basis of health behaviour and lifestyles, as commercial marketers would with products. Targeted and tailored message strategies have been used in antismoking campaigns to build “brand equity”—a set of attributes that a consumer has for a product, service, or (in the case health campaigns) set of behaviours.13Brands underlying the VERB campaign (which encourages young people to be physically active) and Truth campaigns were based on alternative healthy behaviours, marketed using socially appealing images that portrayed healthy lifestyles as preferable to junk food or fast food and cigarettes.14,15
Social marketing campaigns can change health behaviour and behavioural mediators, but the effects are often small.5For example, antismoking campaigns, such as the American Legacy Foundation's Truth campaign, can reduce the number of people who start smoking and progress to established smoking.16From 1999 to 2002, the prevalence of smoking in young people in the US decreased from 25.3% to 18%, and the Truth campaign was responsible for about 22% of that decrease.16
In the preface to Marketing Social Change, Andreasen defines social marketing as “the application of proven concepts and techniques drawn from the commercial sector to promote changes in diverse socially important behaviors such as drug use, smoking, sexual behavior... This marketing approach has an immense potential to affect major social problems if we can only learn how to harness its power.”1By “proven techniques” Andreasen meant methods drawn from behavioural theory, persuasion psychology, and marketing science with regard to health behaviour, human reactions to messages and message delivery, and the “marketing mix” or “four Ps” of marketing (place, price, product, and promotion).2These methods include using behavioural theory to influence behaviour that affects health; assessing factors that underlie the receptivity of audiences to messages, such as the credibility and likeability of the argument; and strategic marketing of messages that aim to change the behaviour of target audiences using the four Ps.3
In a study of 48 social marketing campaigns in the US based on the mass media, the average campaign accounted for about 9% of the favourable changes in health risk behaviour, but the results were variable.17“Non-coercive” campaigns (those that simply delivered health information) accounted for about 5% of the observed variation.17
Even though there often appears to be a myriad number of ways to handle this issue, the vast majority of marketing falls inside within six major modes or methods of communication.
Direct marketing aims to elicit an immediate response of some kind in precisely targeted recipients, ranging from placing a phone call to making a purchase. Marketing messages may take the form of physical mail, telemarketing calls or email.
Sales Promotions. Sales promotions seek to provide an incentive to consumers, typically to purchase a product or increase interest in a brand. Discount pricing, samples and coupons are common types of sales promotions. Promotions that employ discount pricing do run the risk of reducing the perceived value of the product.
Events provide a way to introduce a product or service in a context that targets specific consumers while enhancing the odds of the brand sticking in the memory with an experience. Events that include celebrities often yield free publicity and, by proxy, free advertising.
Advertising. Advertising includes a broad range of approaches that can aim to build brands, improve reputation or increase product purchases. Common methods of advertising include print ads in newspapers and magazines, radio spots and television commercials. Many businesses now integrate online ads. Advertising may target a very specific market ...
Public relations refers to the management and development of beneficial relationships between an organization and public segments, such as stock owners, the media and customers.
Arguably, the exponential growth of Internet use and social media, in particular, makes it the unofficial seventh major mode of marketing communication. However, the line between online communication as a separate mode and the Internet as simply another communication channel through which to engage in advertising, PR, direct marketing and promotional activities remains unclear.
The marketers attract their customers by sending birthday cards and small premiums whenever possible.
According to Kotler (2009), many programs are conducted directly or indirectly to raise awareness among the company’s customers. This is referred to as interactive marketing.
Advertising is the best cost-effective way to educate people about the company’s products and services . Large scale advertising speaks a lot about the company’s size, power and success. They give an opportunity for dramatizing the company and its products. The company also builds its long term image through advertising. The qualities of advertising include public presentation (offers a kind of legitimacy to the product and suggests a standardized offering), pervasiveness (one can repeat message. Compare the messages of various competitors), amplified expressiveness (opportunity for dramatizing the company and its products), impersonality (audience not obligated to pay attention or respond to advertising). Also, there are relatively newer advertising media- like the advertorials -print ads that have editorial content, infomercials – TV commercials etc.
Advertising is the best cost-effective way to educate people about the company’s products and services. Large scale advertising speaks a lot about the company’s size, power and success. They give an opportunity for dramatizing the company and its products. The company also builds its long term image through advertising.
Advertising has a carryover effect that lasts for a very long time. It is an investment that builds of an intangible asset called brand equity. The entire advertising cost is written off in the first year. This reduces the company’s reported profits and hence limits the number of launches of new products.
According to Kotler (2009), events are the company sponsored activities and programs that are created to improve and encourage daily interactions.
According to Kotler (2009), sales promotion consist (s) of a collection of incentive tools, mostly short term, designed to stimulate quicker or greater purchase of particular products or services by consumers or the trade.