Week 3: Applying Theory to Campaign Development Activity

Wow-- what a title! Ok, so today's lesson definitely emphasizes that for better and for worse, sex, money and looks sell. So it's best to use that in health campaigns.

To drive this point home, we had to form groups and take over a topic and age group. My group, the "Paul Newman Fanclub", had to get out a nutritional message to an older adult population. It took an unexpectedly long amount of time for us to get this off the ground. We eventually settled on trying to get older independent living adults to go to a local Farmer's Market. The real point of the activity was to understand the differences between "low involvement" and "high involvement" people. I personally found this challenging at first-- low involvement people in this context aren't necessarily eating poorly, right? The key to it all really was that low involvement people are less interested in the campaign, therefore, we should have lower expectations for change in that group. For low involvement, our group just wanted to expose them to fruits and vegetables; but high involvement (they were probably already eating fruits and vegetables), the objective was to get them to increase the variety through some healthy recipes. My group had a lot of fun with this activity. I mean we had Paul Newman as a spokesperson! For low involvement, the reward was "Hot Farmer Paul Newman" and for high involvement, the inducement was "The Socially-Conscious Paul Newman". We didn't take it too seriously, but I think it was really effective in the end.

The question posed in class was: "Should we use sex, looks and money to promote health"? Well my group's campaign certainly did! Although I have a lot of issues with free choice and health promotion--- I would agree that in the end, we have to use any weapon we can. Unhealthy products use them all the time and we can't combat that effectively without working on that same, subconscious level. Health Promotion and Public Health wants to be above this, but we have to face that facts and research alone have not produced the positive outcomes.

Well that's my opinion-- what's yours?!?