News & Media Advocacy

Asherlev Santos was a great guest lecturer! I enjoyed getting a taste of the global perspective. Issues advocacy can be incredibly complicated given the glut of players involved. I was aware of the restriction on lobbying for nonprofit orgs, but didn't realize there was a "loophole" that allows advocating for your issue so long as not for or against a specific piece of legislation. Policy change should work alongside other public health efforts and interventions.

The main message I took from the Grier & Bryant (2005) article was that public health professionals have been employing an overly narrow fashion. That is, public health approaches social marketing as a technique for communication campaigns. Social marketing encompasses the full marketing mix of product, price, place, and promotion in development of interventions. These 4 Ps can be translated to public health terminology as follows:

• product = social proposition


• price = costs


• place = accessibility


• promotion = communication

So the idea here becomes to highlight the benefits of your product, reduce costs, and improve accessibility alongside the communication campaign. I liked the example of making fruit cheaper and available where it is not (e.g., corner store for a healthier snack option). When I was in high school I worked at the local convenience store (anyone heard of Wawa?), and our bananas were about 3X more expensive than at the supermarket. People rarely bought them. We can't always expect food costs to remain low... sometimes there are things outside of our control that affect supply and drive up prices. I was very upset when I read this article nearly two years ago because I thought I might be losing bananas which are so crucial for the texture of my daily smoothies... Then I received much worse news and the plight of the banana seemed trivial. Two years later I still have my bananas, but I wonder what the future holds.

It's quite possible that the price of bananas has risen and more Americans are priced out, but I haven't noticed. Although I'm a student, I'm relatively comfortable financially and do not have to pinch pennies to feed myself. This is a privilege I take for granted--many people cannot afford or do not have access to fresh fruit. That sort of leads me to the next reading topic, which was getting health disparities into the media--Wallington et al (2009). It didn't surprise me that one of the difficulties for journalists was that public health stories may require a good bit of background research they may not have time or expertise for given tight deadlines and the need to be a generalist. It has to be a story and it has to be framed appropriately. The focus on getting audience buy-in and affecting change in their beliefs/behaviors surprised me a bit. I imagine you can have a story that isn't personally relevant but still engaging. Disparities can be tricky because they often bring up troubling social inequalities that many would rather write off as personal irresponsibility. Newspapers seemed the best and most willing media to tackle these issues, but this medium likely reaches fewer people in part because of self-selection.