I’ve long been a believer in the role marketing can play in advancing issues of public interest, particularly health promotion and disease prevention. The same techniques used to promote commercial goods and services can be used to inform, educate and motivate the public about non-commercial issues, such as the risks of tobacco, obesity, unsafe sex etc.

Advertising, especially, is a powerful educational tool capable of reaching and motivating large audiences. Howard Gossage – thought of by many as advertising’s greatest defender – is famous for saying that ‘advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest – it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes’.

However, there is now a greater focus on seeking a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms through which counter-marketing campaigns achieve their effects. You’ll recognise some of the following approaches from Australia’s most successful campaigns such as the National Tobacco Campaign’s Quit, the TAC’s Wipe off 5, the Cancer Council’s Slip Slop Slap, and the Go for2&5® fruit and vegetable campaign:

• Agenda setting: giving a focus and direction to the intended behaviour change, e.g. moving the decision to quit smoking from the point of quitting ‘some time in the future’ to quitting ‘now’
• Norm reinforcement: depicting behaviours as unfavourable in the media to reduce their perceived social acceptability, e.g. convincing smokers that being a non/ex smoker is the social norm, and that smokers are quitting
• Aligning campaign activity with ‘stages of change’: focusing a campaign’s efforts on shifting an individual who is thinking about performing a behaviour, such as quitting smoking, to actually attempting it, e.g. stimulating negative thoughts about the consequences of their action – in this example, smoking – in order to galvanise their progression toward effective action
• Leveraging dose-response: managing advertising exposure to take advantage of the relationship between message frequency and taking action, e.g. evidence suggests that anti-smoking campaigns can potentially maximise their impact by buying advertising in heavy pulses or bursts, rather than as a continuous lower-weight stream of advertising activity.

In short, it’s a heady mix of principles from marketing 101, psychology 101 and sociology 101. But the overarching principle is still the same as any other marketing communications campaign: make sure you reach the right person at the right time with the right message. Then hit them again and again and again … (that’s the unsophisticated part).

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency with specialist expertise in healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing.

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