Webinar Recap: ‘How to Use Marketing to Change Health Behaviors’

At Rescue, we create behavior change marketing campaigns to make healthy choices easier and more appealing for our audiences. But what is behavior change marketing and how does it work? In our recent webinar “How to Use Marketing to Change Health Behaviors,” Rescue President and Executive Creative provided an in-depth breakdown of behavior change marketing and discussed the various pathways to behavior change. Here are the top takeaways from that presentation.

Behavior change marketing reduces the burden of change for our audiences.

The objective of commercial marketing is to sell a product or service to current customers or likely customers who are already engaging in the requisite behavior. Awareness and memorability are the primary tactics used by commercial marketing to ensure customers remember the brand next time they go to buy the product or service.

In public health, we have to persuade people to completely change something about their lives, providing a persuasive argument that’s relevant to their unique lifestyles, situation, and reality. Behavior change marketing reduces the burden of change for our audiences, making it easier for them to engage in the healthy behavior.

There are three primary pathways of behavior change.

Changing knowledge is the first pathway. This isn’t about just raising awareness; we need to change a piece of knowledge that our audience doesn’t currently know or have. This pathway is most often used to address newer risky behaviors, like vaping. A lot of teenagers began vaping because they didn’t know it was harmful. We had to figure out which harms caused by vaping teens would actually believe, and then how to deliver that information to them in a way that was scientific and resonated with teens. See our ad “Defenseless” as an example.

Changing ability is the next behavior change pathway. This pathway involves changing the policy around a behavior or creating marketing campaigns that empower the audience to be able to do something they didn’t think they could. This pathway is used for very complex behaviors, like nutrition. Most people already know they should eat healthy foods but there are too many obstacles getting in the way. We need to deliver messages that focus on showing audiences how to change, rather than why they should change. See the following ad as an example.

Changing norms is the third pathway, used when the audience already knows they should engage in the healthy behavior, they think they can, but it’s not socially acceptable. The unhealthy behaviors in this pathway have typically been around for a long time, like cigarette smoking, and have become more valuable to the audience than the risks that they’re taking. We can change norms by telling stories that change people’s perceptions about themselves and their culture to create new connections between their values and behaviors. See the following ad "Unforgivable," created for Alternative teens, as an example.

Questions about bringing a behavior change campaign to your community? Contact us.

If you'd like to learn more about behavior change marketing, check out our upcoming webinars, in which experts provide actionable tactics that will help you create campaigns that drive behavior change. If you have any questions about how to bring behavior change campaigns to your community, please contact us.