The Sunday NYT had three articles that addressed issues many social marketers work with everyday: nutrition/obesity, tobacco control and HIV/AIDS prevention. While none of the articles looked at audience or intervention topics, they did raise questions for social marketing about what we do and who we work with to get it done.
Nutrition/Obesity
In the Business section, the headline reads Striking Back at the Food Police (link).The article focuses on the activities of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group originally formed to fight smoking bans in restaurants but has now morphed into an advocacy group for the food and restaurant industries. Of particular interest to me was that the Center does not release a list of companies that support it, demurring that it would serve no purpose. I don’t want these companies getting targeted for something controversial that I’m saying - Rick Berman, the head of the Center.
As various groups mount their programs to address the obesity issue, the article reports that some of the contributors include Coca-Cola, Wendys, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Outback Steakhouse. On the other hand, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods are specifically mentioned as companies that have declined to work with the Center. Something to consider when social marketers (and others) develop their lists of prospective partners in combating the obesity epidemic.
Instead of easing up on its criticism of the C.D.C. for having to change the figure on obesity deaths, Consumer Freedom is turning up the dial. Using internal C.D.C. documents the agency posted on its Web site, the group recently completed a report that accuses the C.D.C. of deliberately inflating its statistics and covering up that it has done so. The C.D.C. said it did not want to comment on that report.
And the group is planning a new television commercial assailing the food police. The ad shows a hand yanking an ice cream cone away from a little boy and grabbing a beer away from a guy at a bar. Do you ever feel like you're always being told what not to do? the ad says. Find out who's driving the food police at consumerfreedom.com.
Food for thought!
Tobacco
In the magazine, the article is Incendiary Device, exploring the ramifications of a new generation of reduced-exposure products (PREP) being introduced by the tobacco industry. New filtration systems are reducing up to 60% on carcinogens in inhaled tobacco smoke (note the distinction I am making that not even the tobacco experts quoted in the article were doing – the ETS issue was completely avoided) while not reducing nicotine delivery. The ethical issue posed in the article was that while having every smoker quit would be the best solution, in the meanwhile while not employ harm reduction strategies for the ones that continue to do so? The parallel to needle exchange programs for HIV prevention came to my mind, but, again, apparently to no one else.
Even the veterans of tobacco policy are loath to make predictions in this area. ''On the one hand, the optimist says, we're on the verge of the era of these low-risk products,'' Kenneth Warner of the University of Michigan explained to me. ''On the other hand, the pessimist says we're on the verge of another light-cigarettes fiasco.'' The optimist sees a sunny time of lower risk and better health, Warner added, while the pessimist sees a dismal future. ''But the thing is, nobody knows. It's the most complicated thing I've ever encountered in 30 years of working on tobacco policy. It is the single-most-difficult issue in terms of trying to predict where it will go or where it can go.''
No answers here either, but the article highlights the contributions technological advances make to (pick one) improving/complicating how social marketers will be designing their future tobacco prevention and cessation programs. [And does anyone remember Olestra?]
HIV/AIDS
There's a church in southern Mozambique that is about 10 yards long, with a tin roof and walls made of sticks. Women gather there to sing and pray and look after the orphans of AIDS victims. When you ask those women and their pastor what they tell people to prevent the spread of AIDS, the first thing they say is that it's important to use condoms.
So begins David Brooks in describing his travels through southern Africa to see what is happening in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
The problem is that while treatment is a technical problem, prevention is not. Prevention is about changing behavior. It is getting into the hearts of people in their vulnerable moments - when they are drinking, when they are in the throes of passion - and influencing them to change the behavior that they have not so far changed under the threat of death.
Not bad for a non-public health professional. And as an author of Consumer-based Health Communication, very on target. But what caught my attention was this insight at the end of his column.
The AIDS crisis is about the sanctity of life. It's about people who have come to so undervalue their own life that ruinous behavior seems unimportant and death is accepted fatalistically.
It's about disproportionate suffering. It's about people who commit minor transgressions, or even no transgressions, and suffer consequences too horrible to contemplate. In America we read in the Book of Job; in sub-Saharan Africa they have 10 Jobs per acre.
It's about these and a dozen other things - trust, fear, weakness, traditions, temptation - none of which can be fully addressed by externals. They can be addressed only by the language of ought, by fixing behavior into some relevant set of transcendent ideals and faiths.
That's a language governments and N.G.O.'s rarely speak. It's a language that has to be spoken by people who connect words like "faithful" and "abstinent" to some larger creed. It has to be spoken, in Africa, by people who understand local beliefs about ancestors and the supernatural. It's a language that has to be spoken by an elder, a neighbor, a person who knows your name.
In short, it’s not just getting the religious leaders to talk about condoms, abstinence and faithfulness, it is also about giving these leaders the marketing tools to be more effective in transforming cultural norms without the political baggage that seems too often to go along with it.
9:58:00 AM 
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