Taunton Social Marketing Training

July 30 – Aug 2
Days 30-34
Taunton (social marketing training), Bristol, Lands End, Polporro

What a week so far!!! We just returned by train from Taunton (Somerset) after a wonderful 4-day excursion through the southwest. We left from Paddington Station on The Great Western Rail system on noon Monday, with a direct train to Taunton, the site of a full-day training for public health people from that region. It’s only a 2-hour ride and upon arrival we took a cab to our B&B, which turned out to be a couple of miles out in the countryside. But what a surprise to find a lovely old manor house with 5-6 beautifully restored “cottages” for guests! Ours was a large castle-like room with walls 2-ft thick and huge beams in the ceiling. The floors were stone with Persian-type rugs and a sofa in front of the fireplace and a 4-poster bed—so comfortable!

A little later we walked into the city (around 40 minutes) on a sidewalk/bikepath and explored and pedestrian-mall/shopping area and even stopped for a drink in the outside café after the long walk. Soon we connect up with our colleague from NSMC and had a great Italian dinner on the main street. Taunton doesn’t stay open late on a Monday; so we hiked back to our “castle” for a good nights rest.

The cab arrived at 9am on Tuesday for our trip into the training session at a place called the Coal Orchard—a local theater and arts center that doubles as a conference center. The training included about 25 local public health and environmental professionals—mostly involved in tobacco control. In addition, there were a few key, senior people from the NHS who played a role in the latter part of the training.

The session followed the same pattern as the previous sessions. I really like the “mood” exercise and the “candy bar branding” exercise where the participants really begin to think about the kind of people in target audiences or who are attracted to certain products. It begins to get people thinking outside of the normal socio-demographic model that we typically use for target audiences.

One interesting aspect of these trainings is that several of the senior and really well-experienced people have trouble with the “marketing mindset”. They have such knowledge and experience with the audiences that they can hardly imagine that there is something that influences audience behavior that hasn’t been already tried—and often fails! Getting them to think about the “emotional hook” to behavior change can be really difficult because it’s hard to disengage them from the health and behavior direct linkage context—usually one established in knowledge and science. That people act emotionally and not always in their own best “scientific” interests can be hard for professionals well-trained in public health.

I thought the training went really well and people started to get the idea about how social marketing is different from typical top-down interventions or even classical health promotion. At the end of the session, the senior people from DH discussed the media campaign for NHS smoking cessation programs. It was quite well-done and interesting! Smoking prevalence has gone steadily down in the UK over the last couple of decades, largely due to the premature deaths of the post WWII smokers—according to the DH data. That’s a sobering thought. The national goals propose a continuing decrease supported by NHS cessation clinics available throughout the nation. Later I asked about the clinics and how the “branding” of the services fit in with the accessibility, acceptability and effectiveness of the services. Apparently they are quite effective, accessible and available in a variety of formats (session, phone, NTS replacement, Chantix assisted, etc.) I collected a few business cards and exchanged a few promises to correspond via email in the future.

One last note: the NHS has assistance teams who move around the country to help PCTs and other local agencies implement tobacco control programs. I found this quite encouraging! Here, as other places where we conducted trainings, I got the feeling that there would have to be a serious program of training and technical assistance in social marketing to achieve success at the local and regional level. I wasn’t able to find out enough about the assistance teams to develop an opinion about whether this was being done to a sufficient degree or whether the teams themselves were trained in social marketing. Something to follow up on in the little time remaining in England….

An interesting quote from the Siegel and Doner book on Marketing Public Health:

“…the key to running effective public health programs is to abandon the traditional practice of deciding what policy makers or the public ought to want and then trying to sell it to them in the absence of significant demand. Instead, public health practitioners must first find out the needs and wants of their target audience (policy makers or public) and then redefine their product (changes in individual behavior or the adoption of public health programs and policies) to satisfy and existing demand. Rather than appealing exclusively to the benefits of improved health, public health practitioners must learn to package, position and frame their programs to appeal to more salient, powerful and influential core values: freedom, independence, autonomy, control, fairness, democracy and free enterprise.” (emphasis mine)M. Siegel and L. Doner, Marketing Public Health 1998: Aspen p. xv.


More about the rest of our trip later….