Change for Life and the Obesity Crisis - Social Marketing Paper

1. 'Social marketing moves beyond offering advice and seeks to solve the problem.' This is an important principle of the thinking behind Change 4 Life. Why does 'offering advice' fail to create behaviour change in tackling obesity?

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Social marketing offers advice to the obese and even the healthy individuals on how to live healthy life. Offering advice, however, fails to create a change in behaviour to tackle the obesity issue. This results due to various reasons. The first reason is that social marketing only offers a chance for short-term change (Eagle et al. 2013).The intrusions used for social marketing and the funding schemes behind social marketing are always short term. They last for about one month with only few campaign projects lasting few years. One thing that the practitioners involved fail to understand is that changing behavior given a short period is difficult. Competitive forces and inadequate resources also make it hard for the obese individuals to change their behaviors. When advertisements to promote healthy behaviours are rare, peoples attentions tend to drift, and they thus go back to their previous habits which do not promote healthy lifestyles (Eagle et al. 2013).We also find that health interventions that are conducted are also brief. In the end, the results are not achieved.

The other reason why offering advice is least useful is that people tend to think that individuals who choose marketing are more likely to be the cause of the problem. They use incentives that will attract people to engage in a particular act without instilling the benefits that a person should aim at attaining. Marketing is believed to be more focused on incentive strategies instead of the moral strategies (Sandel, 2012).This, therefore, leads some people to ignore the work that the social marketers engage in their attempt to encourage healthy lives. The practitioners thus need to adjust their strategies and instill willing and goal-oriented behaviours among the obese individuals to avoid working only to get some incentives.

Furthermore, the other reason leading to a failed change in the behaviour despite offering advice is the failure of the social marketing practitioners to use proper interventions while carrying out their roles. Without the input of the social marketers, the available interventions are ineffective. For change in behavior to occur, it is caused by educating people, by law enforcement, or through some type of exchange (Eagle et al. 2013).The practitioners need to be aware of the insights of individuals. This is made possible by listening to people, understanding their motives, and understanding their habits and attitudes. Knowledge of the above is essential in creating marketing mentalities according to the designs of the interventions. The problem is that at times the practitioners use ineffective interventions which do not work to create change in behaviours of the obese individuals.

Additionally, the impermeability between education, law, and marketability is another reason that has caused difficulty in tackling the obesity problem. To increase the chances of changed behavior, it is important that sufficient training and education is provided to the affected individuals (Rundle-Thiele et al. 2013).The individuals receive limited information pertaining their health issues and this creates inefficiencies. After an engaging and a persuasive educational guide, it is essential that the practitioners ensure that their clients attain a satisfactory position. They should then go further to enforce laws that will encourage healthy lifestyles among individuals. Lack of laws to encourage changed behavior makes the obese individuals reluctant to change their lifestyles (Eagle et al. 2013).The policies to be used in such a case need to be citizen-oriented to encourage and positively impact the affected individuals.

2. Some experts use social marketing in terms of exchanges of costs and benefits. Explain how these principles might be used to design the Change 4 Life programme. What costs are associated with changing behaviours linked to obesity, and what benefits could be offered in exchange?

The social marketing process involves the use of some essential core principles that ensure that the set objectives are met. Some of the core principles include exchange, tools, segmentation, and services and relationship management. The main purpose of social marketing is ensuring that the citizens obtain beneficial exchanges. Exchanges are often difficult to attain especially when its purpose is to stop an existing behavior. There is need to understand the desired behavior in coming up with an intervention (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006). This principle involves a situation where the marketer provides an offer for the client to join his or her program. Some of the offers include being enrolled in some classes, having followed up sessions, and having support activities. It is also under this principle that law and education come in. Laws that relate to obesity, for example, encourage regulations in food industries. The laws need to be effectively administered if a change in the health of citizens is to be achieved. Under the tools principle, it is important to understand consumer insights. Various theories are applied in carrying out research and surveys, and this will help in designing the intervention to be used.

The other principle is segmentation. Segmentation is essential in the allocation of the scarce resources for the various individuals to maximize the outcome. Segmentation helps the social marketers to divide the population according to some characteristics so that they can effectively carry out their roles (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006). It ensures that the target clients are identified, and their needs worked on. Segmentation of the population could be according to the geographical location, habits, or epidemiological characteristics. The next core principle is the services and relationship marketing. This is a key principle since it ensures that the clients needs are satisfied. Satisfied clients is a success for any organization. It focused on the delivery of services. Services are significant in the healthcare sector. For the appropriate services to be delivered, a multi-agency team is necessary. Relationship marketing, on the other hand, is important especially in attacking the criticism that social marketing is short-term oriented (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006). It promotes open communications between the clients and the practitioners and this is important for the attainment of goals. A relationship-based approach is effective especially when offering motivation to a client. Having a client trust a practitioner increases the chances that an obese individual will work towards changing the negative behaviours.

Various costs and benefits are associated with the change of behaviours for the obese individuals. There exist short-term and long-term benefits and short-term and long-term costs. Some of the examples of a short-term cost include reduction of pleasure from the new foods, costs used in the physical training activities, and the costs involved in the alteration of the food environment (Health Survey for England, 2002).The long-term costs include costs borne by National Health Services, costs in the economy, foresight estimate costs to the economy, costs used in the implementation of food policies such as food and nutrition labeling. The short-term benefits, on the other hand, include receiving the incentives promised by the social marketers. A long-term benefit includes gaining the expected weight and being healthy. Other long-term benefits include having a conducive environment for the next generation, increase in life expectancy, reduced cases of obesity-related diseases, and a reduction in the premature deaths.

3. This is a question about partnerships. Change 4 Life has various partnerships contained within the programme. Identify these partnerships and describe what kind of partnerships they are. Explain why these partnerships were seen as so important to the success of Change 4 Life.

Change 4 life believes that by partnering with other organizations, they will achieve their aim of making a bigger difference in the health sector. They believe that working together with others encourages the sharing of case studies, insights, and experience. Some of the partner organizations include the Department of Transport, Disney, ASDA, Boots, the UK Cancer Research, The Co-operative food, Slimming world, DANONE, UK active, Lazy Town, BRITVIC, and ALDI (Croker et al. 2012, p. 404). Change 4 life works with all these organizations to offer them support and the necessary information for they require to maintain healthy conditions across the entire UK.

The Change 4 life partnership with Disney was aimed at encouraging children to do vigorous exercise for 60 minutes every day. Disney committed to helping families to uphold healthy lifestyles. Up to 1.5 million families signed up for this program (Croker et al. 2012, p. 413).Change 4 life has additionally been proved as a great mobilization agent for the entire country to lead healthy lives. With the use of Disney characters, the partnership ensures that children have encouragement stories. Disney conducted research to establish how it could encourage and motivate children. They additionally, used the 10 minute shake-up campaign to achieve their goals.

Change 4 life additionally partnered with LazyTown to encourage the five-year-olds and below to take healthy foods and become physically active. This was based on the fact that children who are active and take healthy foods escape serious illnesses later in their life. The partnership aimed at encouraging the young children to make it a habit to lead healthy lives. Change 4 life chose LazyTown because it is the healthiest kids program in the UK television. The favourable characters include Scooby Doo, Tom, and Jerry (Croker et al. 2012, p. 420). The organization additionally teamed up with Coca-Cola, Asda, and Tesco to promote the reduction of sugar. The campaign which took place in January 2015 aimed at reducing the sugar intake levels of children. This was possible by the process of product swap. The Sugar Swaps campaign was, therefore, launched and animation characters used in the advertisement. Coca-Cola, for example, responded by introducing the Coke Zero and Diet Coke.

The partnerships are significant especially in the goals that change 4 life strives to achieve. The first reason is since the organization aims at promoting healthy lifestyles among all the citizens of the US. These include programs for kids and adults. Partnering with such organizations thus help the marketers to reach an additional number of individuals who need to hear the message on obesity (Croker et al. 2012, p. 424).The partnerships were thus seen as important since they ensured large coverage and encouragement of kids from all over the UK. They additionally help to reduce the costs incurred by the country and educate people on the importance of change. Partnering also increases the pace in which the citizens change their unhealthy habits. This can be attributed to the incentives promised and also to the educational views passed on to the consumers.

Partnering with other organizations also facilitates the research activities. This is important since process such as segmentation and consumer insights require proper survey and research. They thus need to put together the limited resources that each one has to ensure that quality and excellent work is done (Croker et al. 2012, p. 436). The organizations can also share case studies and example of the health matter...