Truth Campaign in Kotler and Lee Article Summary

Public Health Terminology

1. Behaviour-focused positioning: The Maine Department of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHS) aims at reducing opioid addiction by providing the addicts with behavioural changes that increase awareness.
2. Barriers-focused positioning: Condom distribution programs (CDPs) prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections like HIV via increasing availability and accessibility of condoms. Therefore, the public health program minimises the barrier of condom accessibility by making them freely available.
3. Benefit-focused positioning: The World Health Organization (WHO) promotes vaccination by informing the public on the benefit of having a stronger immune system, thus reducing the chances of constructing the virus.
4. Competition-focused positioning: The CDC Alcohol Program has positioned alcohol abuse as a health risk by increasing cancer, liver diseases, violence and injuries.
5. Repositioning: Just Say Yes to Fruits and Vegetables Project (JSY) is a program that prevents obesity by increasing comprehensive nutritional education is requires repositioning the importance of vegetables and fruits over excessive carbohydrates.

Truth Campaign in Kotler and Lee 

The Truth campaign was a national campaign which was intended to eliminate smoking among teens in the United States. According to Kotler and Lee (2008), this campaign provides evidence on the dangers of tobacco. This campaign has been relatively consistent over the decade, something that can be attributed to the research and the promotion of the research findings to the public members. Smoking is a behaviour that predominantly begins in the teenage years, with ninety percent of the smokers beginning by age twenty.

Therefore the Truth would reduce this proportion significantly by educating the teenagers. The strategy used in this case was advertisement through the mass media. This has enabled the effective distribution of the knowledge to a larger number of the youth. This was meant to counter the promotion of tobacco through marketing campaigns.

Truth Campaign Article Summary

Farrelly (2002) sought to examine the influence of the truth campaign, a counter-marketing campaign on tobacco use among the youth. This would be examined through the youth’s intentions, beliefs and attitudes. This is because Truth was marketed as a brand with promotional items like stickers and t-shirts, like the case of Sprite and Nike. This was conducted by analysing surveys delivered remotely using telephones, which were later analysed through multivariate logistic regression.

The researcher was interested in the Hispanic, Asian, and African-American youth by oversampling areas populated with these demographics. The study revealed that the Truth®the campaign was remarkably consistent because it was associated with anti-smoking beliefs and attitudes. This helped counter the advertisements like Philip Morris, which has made the teens more open to the idea of tobacco use.

Read Also: A Reflection Paper on Les Blancs

Piotrow et al. on Strategic Positioning

According to Piotrow et al. (1997), the concept “positioning” was adopted into health marketing from the commercial setting and involves making the health behaviour stand out from something behaviours. Strategic positioning ensures that all the stakeholders understand the essence of strategy in promoting different forms of healthcare like reproductive health services. I leant that this form of positioning facilitates effective communication with the members of the public.

The marketers of the health programs need to work like the advertisers and commercial producers to ensure that they reach the target audience like the youth. A strategic positioning campaign begins with educating the individuals on the promotion and training of the individuals. This involves promoting the provider rather than the individual program. The health program being promoted ought to optimise the individual’s overall development. This requires a clear understanding of the target audience.

References

Farrelly, M. C., Healton, C. G., Davis, K. C., Messeri, P., Hersey, J. C., & Haviland, M. L. (2002). Getting to the truth: evaluating national tobacco countermarketing campaigns. American journal of public health, 92(6), 901-907.

Kotler, P., & Lee, N. (2008). Social marketing: Influencing behaviors for good. Sage.

Piotrow, P. T., Kincaid, D. L., Rimon II, J. G., & Rinehart, W. (1997). Health communication: Lessons from family planning and reproductive health. In Health communication: lessons from family planning and reproductive health (pp. 307-307).