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.