Public Health Branding ─ Applying Marketing for Social Change

Brands are designed to build relationships between consumers and the products, services, or organizations they represent by providing added value to their objects. Through brand promotion, consumers form associations with brands, which can become established and lead to a long-term relationship between the product, service or organization and consumer. Similarly, public health brands are the associations that individuals hold for health behaviours or lifestyles. Public health branding - building positive associations with healthy behaviours and lifestyle choices - is the primary strategy by which commercial marketing is applied in health communication and social marketing.

This book examines theory and best practices of branding and its application in public health programs. Through a series of reviews and case studies, the book argues that branding is an emerging public health strategy that needs resources and continued development of innovative methodologies to effect lasting population-level change. In recent years, public health branding has been successfully applied across a wide range of chronic and infectious disease issues and behaviors - from tobacco control to HIV/AIDS - and globally across the developed and developing world. Branding is an important strategy for public health because it can address multiple behaviours simultaneously, and most health risks stem from multiple behaviours and complex lifestyle choices. Promoting healthy lifestyles is the key outcome for public health, thus making the development of improved branding strategies a critical objective for the field.

W Douglas Evans serves as Vice President of RTI's Public Health and Environment Division. Dr Evans has 16 years of experience in prevention research and program evaluation, social marketing and communications research. He has designed numerous large-scale evaluations and intervention research studies and has extensive experience evaluating behaviour change and public education intervention programs designed to communicate science-based information to diverse audiences. He has published extensively on media influences on health risk behaviour, including the effects of social marketing on behaviour change. Dr Evans has published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Medical Journal, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Health Psychology, Journal of Health Communication, and many others. He has worked extensively in the public health subject areas of tobacco control; nutrition, physical activity, and obesity; and reproductive health. Gerard Hastings is the first UK Professor of Social Marketing and founder/director of the Institute for Social Marketing and Centre for Tobacco Control Research. He researches the applicability of marketing principles such as consumer orientation and relationship building to the solution of health and social problems. He also conducts critical marketing research into the impact of potentially health damaging marketing, such as tobacco advertising and fast food promotion. He teaches and writes on these subjects both in the UK, where he has run Masters and Honours level programmes, and internationally in North America, South East Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He has published over eighty refereed papers in major journals. He is an expert witness in litigation against the tobacco industry, Chairs the Advisory Board of the EC's HELP campaign, and is a regular advisor to the World Health Organisation, and the Scottish, UK and European Parliaments.