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.