Can Social Marketing Really Stop Teenagers Smoking?

18 January 2008

• About 450 children start smoking every day in the UK
• The problem is that young people often don’t want to give up smoking
• Communication has got to be on teenagers’ terms and in language they understand and can relate to
• Social marketing techniques, such as games, can help teenagers stub out the habit

London: 18 January 2008 – Last year, throughout the UK, the legal age for buying tobacco rose to 18, but David Thorp, director of research and information at The Chartered Institute of Marketing, says the new law alone won’t stop teenagers from lighting up and suggests that marketing is key to changing perceptions of the evil weed.

In recent months we’ve watched the nation crack down on smoking with the national ban on smoking in public places. And while more and more adults are quitting the habit, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has revealed that about 450 children start smoking every day in the UK. With 82% of smokers starting before the age of 18, and 39% of under 16’s in the UK smoking regularly, * there’s no doubt that something drastic needs to be done. But what does the Government need to do next?

Teenagers will always find a way around an age limit, just as they do with alcohol; they will ask sympathetic adults to buy their cigarettes for them or take them from older friends and family members.

The ‘don’t do it because it’s bad for you’ message often doesn’t stick any more, partly because it’s seen as an interference from the ‘nanny state’. When you tell a teenager, or anyone for that matter, not to do something the automatic response is to want to do it more.

Teenagers are well aware of the risks of smoking. Many aren’t affected by the message that smoking kills, because when they’re 15 the idea of cancer in forty years’ time often doesn’t resonate with them. The Government needs to find ways that will lead to positive behavioural change, and get the teenagers to voluntarily buy into the argument.

Essentially, they need to try to stop young smokers as early as possible before their addiction truly kicks in. Adult smokers will need more than marketing messages to get rid of their addiction, but people who haven’t started yet or are simply experimenting can have their inclination to smoke successfully challenged and changed, if the right message is given to them at the right time. The problem however is that young people often don’t want to give up.

The ASH forum doesn’t appear to have made a huge difference, for a variety of reasons; so how will this be any different?

The key to social marketing, as with all marketing, is to understand the customer’s frame of mind to understand what’s motivating them to behave in the way they do. Once you understand that, you can offer messages that they want to buy into and agree with. Adult campaigns showing smokers dying of cancer and cigarette stickers with images of smokers’ lungs can work with adults but are often irrelevant to teenagers, most of whom don’t think about their mortality at such a young age.

In order to really change behaviour, we need to talk to young people in their environment, and communicate in their tone and style and make the message relevant to them. This is where social marketing comes into play.

Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing techniques to public health and other social issues. Just as commercial marketers develop products, set appropriate prices, consider the best times and places to be available, and promote their products through advertising and incentives, social marketers do the same thing to influence individuals to change their behaviour in a positive way. Marketers can help to reduce the barriers to desired behaviour by making rewards more accessible or by changing the environment so that it becomes easier to fit the desired behaviour into existing lifestyles.

By thinking from the mindset of the teenager we can re-evaluate how we build relationships and perhaps be more subtle and casual in how we approach them; by thinking from the teenager’s point of view you get further insights into what approaches succeed. Teenagers care about their looks, their fitness, and their spare cash, so one approach is to tap into this. Emphasising the positive benefits of not smelling of smoke, having clear skin and white teeth, and the positive impacts this will have on their attempts to, say, attract their next girlfriend or boyfriend is likely to be a more effective message.

Or to take another example, for teenagers who like sport, whether it’s rugby, football or hockey, emphasise the benefits of healthier lungs to enhance performance.

In terms of the approach, use the communication channels that young people like using – such as social networking sites. Any messages you offer need to be consensual and it’s a good tip to encourage viral communication, by creating messages that teens are more likely to forward to each other. By exploring the Internet sites the teenagers visit, you can see what works and what doesn’t and learn how to communicate with them by seeing how they communicate with each other. Teenagers don’t have to take what they’re given any more – they can choose what they want to hear. If they don’t like what you have to say, they really can take it or leave it.

Communication has got to be on their terms and in language they understand and relate to.

In October The Roy Castle Foundation launched an innovative online game targeting the image-conscious teens (http://www.roycastle.org/atyc/). The Effects of Smoking enables young people to upload a photograph of themselves on to a website and view the ageing effects of smoking on their skin, teeth and eyes. Teenagers are likely to forward onto one another as what initially appears to be amusing but is actually a hard hitting message making this technique work really well.

This type of campaign to discourage smokers completely is in stark contrast to the successful marketing campaigns run by the tobacco companies in the 1950s which positioned smoking as an attractive habit by tying into Hollywood stars, such as Audrey Hepburn, which got women hooked. Today, although smoking is banned from adverts and very much frowned upon in Hollywood by the size 0 health fanatics, role models like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse sometimes appear to glamorise smoking with a rebellious tone, creating a great challenge for the Government.

Preventing our next generation from millions of tobacco-related deaths is by no means an easy task and unfortunately there isn’t one solution for all. The Chartered Institute of Marketing suggests that the Government can achieve great results by looking at new ways of communicating with young people and finding innovative ways of researching teenager’s values, to discover what resonates with them. By engaging rather than preaching and using social marketing techniques, we may just see some great success and help teenagers stub it out

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