Serious Changes

Serious. Changes. Oh boy. Give me your thoughts, friends:

• FE: Michigan Steps Up!
• Competence: Motivation to live a healthier lifestyle
• Goals:
• Reduce smoking
• Reduce overweight/obesity rates
• Increase rates of physical activity
• Increase amount of healthy eating
• Time Frame: 5 years
• Category: Health information providers
• Customer Definition: Current user of Michigan Steps Up! materials
• MO: Acquisition
• SV: Stimulate demand
• Bodies: Frequent fast food purchasers (10 or more times a month)
• Beliefs: 
• Before: Cooking takes too much time/is too hard. I'm going to stop at McDonald's on the way home.
• After: Cooking is easy and fun.
• Behaviors:
• Before: I'm going to stop at McDonald's on the way home.
• I'd rather cook than eat fast food.
• Benefits:
• Weight loss (potential)
• Reduced health care costs (potential)
• Family time (potential)
• Better health
• Key Competitors: physicians, weight loss programs, supported and unsupported information (think Internet)
• Main Variable: Convienence
• Dynamic Variable: Ease of use
• Communications Plan: Basic awareness or information (must educate customers on both new brand and category)

Michigan Steps Up!'s Communications Objective

Since the target audience already wants to be healthier, the objective and measure focus will be on behavior, actually eating a healthy meal. One of the drawbacks of the Michigan Steps Up! campaign is that, to my knowledge, data was not collected on eating or exercising behaviors prior to the campaign. Of course, from secondary data (that 61% obese or overweight statistic) we can assert that eating and exercising behaviors needed to be changed, but surveying Michiganders on their current habits could have better directed the communications objective.

If this campaign's communication objective had been top of mind awareness, then they failed miserably. I suppose I can't say that with certainty, but at least very few of my classmates recognize this 5-year campaign. Nor did it encompass the consumption culture. It could have incorporated its materials to better fit healthy eating into the busy lives held by its target audience. While it offered snacking tips and recipes, it didn't do much for the single mother who works full time and has two kids. Nor did it do much for the middle-aged man who drives an hour to work every day and when he comes home, is faced with household and family duties.

Fortunately, this campaign neither chose to use an information communications objective. It's been tried and tested, telling people that fast food is bad for their health does nothing to encourage them to make healthy meals. Nothing.

This campaign may or may not have been successful with an image communications objective. The FE doesn't have awareness or information working for it, but MDCH has great credibility.

Regardless, I believe the Michigan Steps Up! campaign went for a behavioral communications objective. It's a call to action to eat healthier. Although I couldn't find a copy of the Michigan Steps Up! ad, I believe the campaign might have been based off the larger HHS SmallSteps campaign. Here's one of their ads.

Michigan Steps Up!'s Product

Product: Michigan Steps Up! Web site
Attributes:

• Search (can be evaluated prior to consumption):  Tips, recipes, health assessment plan, program to map out increased activity/healthy eating goals
• Experience (can be evaluated after consumption): Lack of bloated feeling, more energy, weight loss
• Credence (cannot be evaluated even after consumption): Attractiveness, healthiness

*Note: For this campaign, experience and credence attributes may not take place immediately. One of the difficulties in "selling" healthy behavior is that most of the time you cannot see or feel their benefit, and if you can, it takes too long.

Customer Definition Redefinded

So, what I wrote about Ted in my 5-box actually doesn't really describe his as well as it could for this marketing evaluation. After spending time in class going through Pinar's customer definition, I now understand that every sentence needs to relate to my target customer's wants, needs, beliefs and values. It should tell me my source of volume (whether I need to stimulate demand or steal my competitor's customers), as well as my marketing objective (my ideal customer - a Ted that eats healthy). So, I've re-described Ted. Give me your thoughts. (It's a little on the obvious side, but I'm an amateur.)

Ted drives a 45-minute commute to his middle management position at a firm in the city every day. Working long hours during the week, Ted often stops for dinner at the McDonald’s directly between his work and home. Ted likes to spend his weekends fixing up the house and playing with his 5-year-old twin daughters. Ted’s wife, June, also works full time and between their jobs and their children, neither Ted nor June find much time to cook. In fact, Ted has never cooked much more than macaroni and cheese and hot dogs in his entire life, but he does enjoy good cooking. Ted knows he’s overweight, but his weight hasn’t increased in the past six months so he’s not very concerned. Jim would like to be healthier, but the demands of work and his family are more important and too fatiguing to consider the extra efforts required to cook healthy meals.

4 B's Worksheet

Um, can we take a step back to Sources of Volume please? My usual tactic of ignoring what I don't understand and blindly plowing ahead is not so successful right now. It's going to be difficult to correctly do my segmentation, targeting and positioning without correctly identifying bodies, beliefs, behaviors and benefits.

Give me your thoughts, people. Am I earning share or am I earning share?

Value Props Worksheet

Feedback welcome!

Market vs Public Health: Compare & Contrast Segmentation

In Christine Nordhielm's book, Marketing Management: The Big Picture, support for segmentation argues that the more defined an audience is, the more likely you'll be able to convert them all to the attitude/behavior you want them to hold.

I can't help but think how we use this concept in public health initiatives. Instead of the terms "customer definition" and "main variable" we use "cultural competence" and "beliefs" and "barriers/benefits." When we implement a public health program, we segment our audience just as a market does its. The difference is that while a market can go after the single segment it's interested in, a public health practitioner must identify the beliefs, barriers and benefits of each segment and do them all well.

Having Trouble Identifying Category Definition

Originally assumed my category was health promotion, but is it actually lifestyles? If I make the category health promotion, that my customer must already be seeking to live a healthier lifestyle. However, if I make the category lifestyles, my customer is basically everyone and I can target those I really want to influence, those living unhealthy lifestyles (who may or may not want to change).

Marketing Objective & STP

Michigan Steps Up focuses on three behaviors: move more, eat better, quit smoking. I'm going to work with the "eat better" component.

• Category Definition: Health promotion in Michigan
• Benefit: Making living a healthier lifestyle easier
• Leader: Disputable, survey needed
  
• Other players: Physicians, media
• Key competitors: Fast food stores, time spent at work, access to healthy & affordable food

• Customer Definition/Target Audience: All Michiganders eating unhealthily on a consistent basis (this definition should probably be more specific based on theory – those wanting/ready to change eating behavior) (also anticipating difficulty because it’s a behavioral change – attitudes seem to be easier to alter)
   
• Key Activity: Acquisition-stimulate demand

4 B’s Analysis:

• Bodies: Michiganders who eat unhealthily
• Beliefs: Eating healthier is easy and I can do it
• Behaviors: Snacking healthier, eating better portion sizes, grocery shopping for healthier food items, eating in/cooking more often
• Benefits:
• Decreased rate of being overweight or obese in Michigan
• Decrease health care spending on obesity-related diseases 
• Longer life span of Michiganders 
• Better social image of Michigan

• Path to purchase (still need to quantify pending response from Surgeon General):
• Before beliefs: Buying and cooking healthy food takes too long and is not accessible. Plus, I can’t cook.
• After beliefs: Purchasing healthy food is easy and I have the knowledge and ability to cook it
• Before behaviors: Picking up fast food on the way home, eating microwave dinners, purchasing comfort food at grocery story, high consumption of high-fat/high-calorie foods, eating large portion sizes
• After behaviors: Cooking dinners, shopping for healthy food, increased consumption of fruits/vegetables, eating moderate portion sizes

Tip of the Day

So one night, Surgeon General Kimberly-Dawn Wisdom sat down at her kitchen table and wrote out this great list for us Michiganders trying to be healthier. She figured if the changes were small enough, we'd actually do them and turn them into a healthy habit.

Think it will work? Check out some of these tips and decide for yourself:

• Dance to three songs on the radio
• Be active during TV commercial breaks. Jump rope or life 5-lb weights.
• Laugh to reduce stress
• Stretch while in front of the TV 
• Dine at smoke-free restaurants

The Business Objective... Dun Dun Duhhhhhhh

Fundamental Entity (FE): Michigan Steps Up campaign
So if I understand FE correctly (one would hope by this point!), then Michigan Steps Up services under their FE would be their walking challenges, partnerships with local sports teams and their Health Risk Assessment quiz.

Core Competence: This one is still tricky for me because I’m not sure this campaign has a skill they’ve really honed in on and that is resident throughout the entire campaign. I’ll say, skill at motivating individual health behavior change or skill at information dissemination (regarding how to improve health). Thoughts?

Goal: To improve the quality of life of Michiganders by improving their health.

Time Frame: Not sure just yet. Waiting to hear from Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH).

Competition & Critical Marketing - This is going to be harder than I thought!

After reading Chapter 8: Competition and critical marketing in Gerald Hasting’s Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Tunes? (2007), I realized that the social marketing campaign I’m interested in evaluating may actually have competitors. Michigan Steps Up is a campaign to help Michiganders live healthier lifestyles by exercising, eating healthy and not smoking, but there are so many barriers to doing those activities. Time, access, patience, taste and stress are only some of the competitors this campaign faces.

Hastings also introduced me to the World Health Organization’s concept of “hazard merchants,” companies that sell unhealthy products such as tobacco and alcohol. For the Michigan Steps Up campaign, every fast food restaurant and every convenience store is a hazard merchant. I’ll need to evaluate whether or not Michigan Steps Up provides warnings about the hazards of competitors to living a healthy lifestyle, and if so, to what extent.

I’m still trying to wrap my thoughts around the collaboration issue. It’s clear that collaboration on tobacco use is not possible. I’ll need to spend more time identifying competitors to healthy eating and exercise before deciding on collaboration. It appears that healthy options at fast food vendors, such as a salad at McDonald’s, may be some sort of compromise. The exercise issue will be more difficult, since it’s likely that its two main “competitors” are time and pain.

New to Social Marketing? Have I Got the Blog for You.

If there's anyone who knows about public health and social marketing, it's R Craig Lefebvre. Check him out here.

On his Web site I found the following paragraph about the audience benefit. Is this the fundamental entity (value) we're trying to capture in social marketing?

"The Audience Benefit

Benefits exist in the mind of the audience, consumer or user. They are not tangible things, though tangible items can sometimes capture the essence of a benefit if carefully designed. Benefits tap into the underlying motivations of groups of people (or segments); they are not health, a cleaner environment, access to services or even money. For example, in our work with state children’s health insurance programs, the audience insight into the benefit for parents to enroll in SCHIPs was not access to care; it was peace-of-mind. It was being able to allow their child to fully participate in life like other kids without the parent’s nagging concern about ‘what happens if…?'"

MKT 614: Social Marketing - The Beginning

Welcome!

Here is the obligatory introductory blog post. Looking forward to better understanding social marketing over the next 7 weeks.