Crafting Campaign Themes (and Slogans) for Preventing Overweight and Obesity

Public Relations Quarterly, 2008 by Pratt, Cornelius B

[P]eople have a responsibility to tackle this issue at an individual level, [even though] a large majority also sees a need for government to play some role in helping individuals accomplish those goals.

- Trust for America's Health (2007, p. 85)

But personal responsibility is not a free pass for corporate irresponsibility. It is easier to just say no when you aren't being manipulated and marketed to say yes.

- Goodman (2003, p. A21)

Government agencies, foundations, and businesses use public-education and social-marketing campaigns to motivate the nation toward having better health through, among other things, healthful-eating habits and active lifestyles. Some of those efforts, however, have had modest successes. This article presents seven ground rules - or principles - that can improve the effectiveness of campaigns aimed at shrinking bulging waistlines. But the limits of such principles must be stated at the outset: Because social, interpersonal, community, and ecological factors influence health behaviors (Glanz, Rimer, & Lewis, 2002), well-crafted messages can help health communicators meet their campaign objectives only to the degree that those factors enable. Thus, on the one hand, a confluence of environmental and physiological factors inherently negates the effects of weight-management campaigns. Economics and social-psychological factors (e.g., cost of energy-dense foods, social networks, and interpersonal communication), on the other hand, affect the success of message themes, particularly those on intractable U.S. health issues such as excess weight gain and obesity. Consequently, even when well-crafted messages influence peoples' nutrition and exercise regimens, they do not necessarily result in meeting overall campaign objectives.

Situation Analysis

On August 21, 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), one of several federal agencies that are tackling the overweight and obesity crisis that afflicts 66 percent of the U.S. population, announced the establishment of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020, as a follow-up to its earlier initiative, Healthy People 2010. Less than a week later, a nonprofit organization, Trust for America's Health (TFAH), announced in a report, the fourth in a series aptly titled "F as in Fat," disturbing, yet predictable, findings indicating that our national battle against the bulge has yet again earned a failing grade and implying that the efficacy of many government programs and initiatives on obesity and overweight may be in question (Trust for America's, 2007).

Who's to blame? Are we, as individuals, doing our level best to reverse the obesity trend in the United States - or are we placing much of that responsibility on organizations? On October 19, 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives answered yes to the latter question by passing the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, which bars frivolous lawsuits on excess weight gain or obesity allegedly attributed to consumption of restaurant food. That bill failed to become law.

According to TFAH's 2004 report on obesity, it had been viewed traditionally and exclusively as an individual problem; however, the report recommended that "the best way to achieve real, sustainable behavior change is through a combination of education plus community, state, and federal policies and programs that support individual action" (Trust for America's, 2004, p. 4, emphasis added). And such programs inarguably run the gamut: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, in August 2003, set up an Obesity Working Group, which had policies on the labeling practices of food manufacturers, on having food manufacturers provide accurate information on serving sizes and calories count, on spreading the message that calories count, and on requiring restaurants to provide more nutritional information to consumers (Trust for America's, 2004).

Also, DHHS's Healthy People 2010 stated that health education should include information about the consequences of unhealthful diet and of inadequate physical activity. And, for at least a decade, a welter of similar government initiatives had been marshaled to boot: the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion's Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005; the Federal Trade Commission's consumer guides on obesity that included Consumer Alert! Paunch Lines: The Skinny on Dieting; Setting Goals for Weight Loss; Pump Fiction: Tips for Buying Exercise Equipment; Tipping the Scales? Weight-Loss Ads Found Heavy on Deception; and The Facts About Weight Loss Products and Programs. All those public-education materials had long been touted as having the potential to alleviate overweight as a public-health challenge.

How much impact have those programs alone had on overweight and obesity in the United States? Because of the complexity of factors that affect the maintenance of healthy weight, singular national effect of those programs is not known. What is known, however, is that an increase in adult obesity rates occurred in 31 states in 2006, with 22 such states having an increase for the second year in a row (Trust for America's, 2007). Between 1980 and 2004, childhood obesity rate more than tripled, a rate that former U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona (The Obesity Crisis, 2003, ¶ 21) attributed to two fundamental reasons: "Too many of our children are eating too much and moving too little." And those trends occurred despite massive, concerted efforts by government, corporate, and interest groups to stem the tide of a health problem that 85 percent of respondents in a TFAH survey believe "has reached epidemic proportions in the United States" (Trust for America's, 2007, p. 85).