Social marketing key to improving health care

SALT LAKE CITY — The national health care reform act assumes patients will proactively take care of themselves to reduce their need for medical care. But making it happen will require a targeted social marketing strategy, according to a study led by a University of Utah marketing professor.

"There are barriers to consumers having healthy lifestyles," said Debra Scammon, Emma Eccles Jones professor of marketing at the U. Eccles School of Business. "As healthcare providers and marketers and public policy makers, it's helpful if we understand those barriers and help deal with them."

The article, "Transforming Consumer Health," identified three big challenges: "the ability to understand health conditions and what they can do about it. The ability to make decisions about the best thing to do in a given situation, and the ability to maintain behavior changes," she said. "That's awfully hard."

It was published in the June edition of the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

Social marketing goes after "the common good" rather than financial gain. It's a tool that has increased use of seat belts and reduced smoking in public. It has succeeded with health care before, from The Truth anti-smoking campaign to the RED Awareness campaign for AIDS and the Presidential Fitness nutritional and exercise initiative.

The goal of the researchers, who came from a diverse group of universities, was to find marketing techniques that help across all three barriers. And the one that did that was social marketing, which segments the market instead of trying to make one size fit all.

If you're trying to get people to have a healthy diet, for example, but they live in the inner city and only get to a corner market that doesn't offer fresh produce, you have to deal with that, she said. For a family with no idea how to make a healthy meal, it might be most helpful to provide recipes, rather than a lecture about fruits and vegetables.

Kids respond to social media and text messages, which aren't the most effective tools for senior citizens.

"I think in Obamacare, there's a lot of assumption that consumers will be accountable for their own actions and do what they need to do to execute the care plan," Scammon said, including signing up for the right health benefit plan, for example. But many people don't know how to do that and will have to learn. And it's "not just information and education, but also motivation is really important."