Pales diet among overweight adult women in the United States, the social marketing theory will be utilized. The AS for the promotion of this diet will be at the macro level of analysis, as a large and diverse group of women make up the target audience. The social marketing theory is about making a target audience view a certain health behavior as a product. The goal of this theory is to market the health behavior in a way that the target audience will voluntarily adopt the healthy behavior.
The social marketing theory focuses on four Up’s—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The product is the specific health behavior that is being marketed. The price is the costs associated with adopting the health behavior. The target audience must view these costs as low or manageable in order to adopt the behavior. These costs could include social costs and personal costs. The place looks at how the target population will be able to access the resources necessary to implement the behavior. If the resources needed to implement the lath behavior are not readily available, the behavioral change will not be very practical.
The promotion aspect of the social marketing theory is putting the product, price, and place together in order to promote or advertise the health behavior (Dubbed, 60). There are said to be six basic stages of this health promotion theory that work in a cycle or loop. The stages are: plan strategy, select channels and materials, develop materials and presenting, implementation, assessment of effectiveness, and feedback in order to revise the program (Evans, 2006). For the promotion of he Pales diet, the intervention/ AS will be at the implementation stage, and will more specifically focus on the second P of social marketing theory?product.
The goal is to make the target audience realize that the Pales diet doesn’t really require any vast knowledge of nutrition or calorie counting?it is actually quite simple. Not many people realize exactly what the Pales diet is and the benefits they can receive from it. If the target audience has a better comprehensive understanding of the Pales diet, they may be more likely to implement it because hey will be more informed. The social marketing theory is an especially good choice for this specific target audience?overweight, adult women in the United States.
The target audience is, generally, very concerned with appearance. If this promotion campaign shows women that the Pales diet is easy to follow and that they can lose weight from it (a benefit), they will likely be very interested in becoming Pales. This macro level theory might have more success than a micro level theory would, as this promotion campaign doesn’t focus on the individual as much. Instead, it’s cooking to inform a big group of people of what the Pales diet is and the benefits they can get out of it.
Another construct that makes the social marketing theory a good choice for this target audience is market segmentation. Market segmentation is breaking down a target population into smaller groups, then studying the values and important characteristics of the groups. Market segmentation is useful because it allows social marketers to tailor campaigns to specific groups of people (Dubbed, 61 For this AS, instead of targeting all overweight women in the United States?the argue audience is broken down into two groups based on socioeconomic status.
The AS will target overweight women in the United States at a moderate to high level of SEES as these women likely have better access to healthy foods than women of low SEES. The social marketing theory will help change the behavior of the target audience by making the women understand the many benefits (easy/ can lose weight) that can come from adopting the Pales diet. Because the use of market segmentation allows the message to be tailored to the target audience, the ales of these overweight women will be taken into account during the creation of the AS.
