Social marketing-based strategy for obesity interventions

[Extract] The evidence base suggests that, if carefully created and deployed, social marketing can make an important contribution in combating obesity. We found limited exemplars to illustrate, but one such is the US VERB programme aimed at ‘tweenies’. The lack of exemplars is due to the low level of social marketing expertise applied to health interventions to date. In our view , the key missing link has been insufficient attention paid to the idea of “customer value”. People need personal motives to change behaviour – reasons to change that outweigh the benefits of their current behaviour. However, social marketing on its own is not predicted to be sufficient to shift BMI levels without large scale help from environmental changes. Intensive one-to-one programmes have been shown to work well (but are costly), but the limited success of US Stanford, Pawtucket and Minnesota trials illustrates that obesity is possibly the most difficult of all health problems to solve at a ‘population level’. Social marketing should be seen as part of the solution: to be deployed with appropriate budget support, alongside other approaches. It is also a long term option: the success of anti-smoking and anti-drink drive programmes is down to a determined, multi-faceted public health approach over many years