Social Marketing Practice Lab

  1. Social marketing Practice Lab
  2. With my group, we came up with the public health problem of youth tobacco use and the behavioral objective of youth tobacco use prevention. This practice lab looked into the barriers, benefits, potential motivators, and competition for our audience to achieve our behavioral objective of prevention.
  3. This practice lab looked into the perceived barriers our audience may have to adopting our desired behavior, the key perceived benefits our target audience wants in exchange for performing the desired behavior, what our target audience says will make it more likely that they would do the behavior, what the major competing alternative behaviors are, the benefits our audience associates with the competing behaviors, and the costs our audience associates with the competing behaviors.
  4. Using the ecological model of intrapersonal relationships, interpersonal relationships, environmental/community relationships, and policy/government relationships, we identified the possible barriers, benefits, motivators, and competition for our target audience to achieve our behavioral objective.
  5. Using the ecological model,
    • We found for barriers:
      • On an intrapersonal level, lack of health literacy, some do not see a problem and freedom feeling due to commercialized images of tobacco marketing.
      • On an interpersonal level, caregivers can model a poor health behavior and can cause youth to believe this health outcome is normal, and there can be peer pressure from siblings or friends being the social norm.
      • On the environmental/community level, community organizations such as sports teams or religious organizations can influence youths’ tobacco use and there can be lack of prevention support systems in the community.
      • On the policy/government level, accessibility can influence use due to tobacco produce being sold at multiple easy access locations.
    • Benefits:
      • On an intrapersonal level, avoiding tobacco use completely, and not being controlled by tobacco companies’ campaigns.
      • On an interpersonal level, having good role models to influence positive reinforcement at home and being surrounded by respectable peer groups.
      • On the environmental/community level, increased prevention resources, and community evolving to agree tobacco use is not a “cool” thing – changing the social norm.
      • On the policy/government level, staying out of government trouble with tobacco use.
    • Potential Motivators
      • On an intrapersonal level, save your money to spend on things other than tobacco products.
      • On an interpersonal level, friends and family modeled behavior or possible peer pressure.
      • On the environmental/community level, group support systems.
      • On the policy/government level, grants or scholarships for pledging not to use tobacco.
    • Competition
      • Vaping.
      • The target audience would associate these competing behaviors to try and fit in and due to perceived maturity.
      • The cost for using tobacco and vaping is increase morbidity and mortality.
  6. Recommendations after doing this practice lab is to always create a framework when making a social marketing project. This allows everyone on the team to analyze what they know about the target audience, what they need to learn, and what they need to focus on with the campaign.
  7. This is significant to public health because of the health concerns with tobacco use, especially in youth. This practice lab showed how to lay out what the public health problem of focus is, the desired objective, how to work out the barriers and competition, and list the benefits and motivators for the target audience. This taught us how to work together as a public health team and create a social marketing campaign framework. We were able to collaborate and learn from each other during this practice lab.
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