Social norms marketing: Public health context

This 40 minute presentation is the first presentation in the full-day Learning Institute, "Social norms marketing interventions: Context, evidence, planning, implementation & evaluation." This presentation will provide participants in the Learning Institute with a context for the remainder of the day. Social norms interventions will be placed in context both in relationship to public health challenges and to commercial advertising.

Since the beginning of the last century, the primary public health concerns in developed nations have shifted from control of infectious diseases to control of chronic diseases. The primary means of controlling infectious diseases will be briefly reviewed, with an emphasis on sanitation, nutrition and vaccination. This review will be accomplished largely through audience participation. The audience will then be led through a discussion of the current public health challenges, namely chronic diseases. This will provide the basis for a discussion of what is needed to control chronic diseases, with an emphasis on lifestyle and behavioral changes, and the difficulty of convincing people to make and sustain such changes.

With this background, we will than turn to an examination of commercial advertising, as an exemplar of marketing to convince people to engage in a behavior, typically to buy something. Multiple examples from commercial advertising will provide the basis for audience discussion of the main means that commercial advertising uses to appeal to people. This discussion will result in conclusions such as: making the product attractive, making it seem that you will be more attractive with the product, convincing you that everyone else already has the product or wants it. Advertisements from varying times and venues will be used to introduce the idea of audience segmentation and the design of advertisements to appeal to particular groups.

Participants will then be presented with exemplars of traditional public health advertisements. Audience discussion will again be used to draw out some of the main means used in public health advertising, including “terrorizing,” stigmatizing, accentuating the negative, and normalizing the negative. These will then be contrasted to the commercial advertising approach.

This highly interactive beginning will both set the stage for detailed consideration of social marketing and social norms marketing, and provide an energetic, participatory start to the day.