Building A Healthier Scotland
Welcome to the inaugural Discovering Futures' conference for social marketing: "Building a Healthier Scotland, from principle to practice: exploring the potential of social marketing to build a healthier Scotland".
Why social marketing?
The importance given to the improvement of our living standards by all sectors of society is ceaseless; the governments of the UK are striving to set new and ever-more challenging targets and goals.
In Scotland, the Scottish Government is introducing a demanding agenda for improving the health and well-being of its citizens. The goals are laudable, and often ambitious, and present their own challenges for professionals and services charged with meeting these targets.
Alarm bells are also ringing. The reality of life expectancy actually decreasing in parts of the developed world is now a real possibility. The onset of obesity, inactivity, heart disease and type two diabetes are just some of the concerns. To deliver effectively on our public health ambitions, we need to understand human behaviours and their social context, and how this impacts on the decline of health.
Social marketing provides insights needed to address aspects of individual and social behaviour in ways which can have long lasting affects on the well being of a group. This success has made the discipline an important policy driver and has led to it being taken increasingly seriously throughout government, the health care professions and in academia.
Social marketing is a maturing discipline – it has drawn on the full range of social sciences and social policy approaches as well as marketing. Anyone working with the public, regardless of area or discipline, can benefit from the customer-focused insights that the discipline engenders. A successful social marketing campaign is an invaluable tool in the battle against malaise and ignorance, and in achieving positive behavioural change.
A small but growing band of professionals have been able to practice effective social marketing; fewer know how to do it - fewer really appreciate what it is.
Now is the time to grasp the opportunity to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of social marketing and, with it, a sustainable advantage for your organisation and your campaign ambitions.
Join us
Join the country's foremost experts on social marketing - from health professionals to health and social policy makers; and innovative creative agencies to higher education specialists - and they will help you gain invaluable new insights into this under-developed but essential strategic activity.
Whatever your health professional role, this conference will provide insights into the operational and strategic aspects of social marketing; the discipline will be contextualised and grounded in real life issues and case studies which are directly relevant for the current Scottish health agenda.
Key issues
The event promises to provide an exciting mix of sessions as speakers discuss the many aspects of putting a successful social marketing intervention together. They will offer views on how social marketing techniques can be applied in an ever-changing, complex and free society for the public good.
Sessions cover:
- the potential of social marketing in improving the health of Scottish people
- meeting HEAT targets through social marketing
- applying social marketing principles to health strategy
- a comparison of social marketing in the NHS in England
- putting social marketing into practice
- evaluating and monitoring social marketing campaigns
- case studies and operational strategies for creating and implementing social marketing interventions
Our sponsors
We are grateful to the University of Strathclyde's department of marketing for offering exerpertise on the subject of social marketing; to Barkers Social Marketing for assistance with infrastructure and some IT services; and Marketing Week for their marketing and campaign services.
