Social marketing and health literacy in the health society

The public health white paper Choosing Health affirmed the Government’s commitment to a consumer centred approach to health improvement. It identified the importance of consumers both as users of health information and services – and as agents who can work together to effect improvements.

The rapid technological and social changes of the past decade have brought both benefits and new challenges for all of us both as consumers and citizens. In many respects health has become a dominant feature of modern societies. Commentators have identified the following as key features of the so called ‘health society’.

• An attention to increasing life expectancy
• Expansive health and medical care systems
• Rapidly growing private health markets
• The prevalence of health as a dominant theme in social and political discourse
• Health as a major personal goal in life and as a right of citizenship

These developments place new demands on us all to know about and to act in ways that influence our health. These may be through adopting and maintaining healthier lifestyles, navigating a way through social and medical care systems, or understanding and behaving as empowered consumers of health products and services.

Enabling and supporting citizens to take control of factors that effect their health is central to the idea of active citizenship. It is also this idea – the customer orientation to the achievement of social goals – that is at the heart of social marketing.

Social marketing starts from the premise that a consumer orientation is essential for the achievement of policy goals. A key challenge for social marketing is to enable consumers to critically interpret mass media messages in order to make informed decisions.

As part of the developing role of social marketing, we hope to understand better the health literacy needs of the public in order to develop social marketing interventions that assist people to gain greater control over the factors that influence their health. In this way health literacy has an important role to play as a social determinant of health – and one which may be important to address as a means of reducing inequalities in health.

References

_{Department of Health (2004). Choosing health: Making healthy choices easier. TSO London
Nutbeam, D. (2000). Health literacy as a public health goal: A challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century. Health Promotion International, 15(3), 259–267.
Zarcadoolas, C., Pleasant, A., & Greer, D. (2005). Understanding health literacy: An expanded model. Health Promotion International, 20, 195–203.}