Cancer Research: Health professionals should mimic ‘big business marketing’

Cancer Research UK has said that health professionals need to mimic “big business tactics” to think of patients as consumers and stakeholders instead of focussing on the products offered to them

It says that many healthcare professionals need to build long-term relationships with its consumers because this is the best way to ensure their health is being maintained through social marketing. This may involve rewarding patients in some way so that they do not see giving up smoking, for example, as a chore that will deprive them from the pleasure of smoking, but something that they should invest in, according to the charity.

Professor Gerard Hastings of Stirling University’s institute of social marketing, said: “Most people know, for instance, that smoking is dangerous, or that their diet could be improved. They don’t change their behaviour because they perceive some other benefit in it – relaxation perhaps, or a treat.”

“The secret for the social marketer is to devise a way of enabling them to get the same benefit more healthily,” he concluded.

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, added: “Finding ways to make initiatives that encourage healthy behaviour more relevant to people is incredibly important because we know that half of all cancers could be prevented by changes to lifestyle.”

The charity pointed to health systems in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US as health systems which included social marketing as a method to get patients more interested in their own health. It also pointed to a successful study in the west of Scotland that encouraged the poorest people with mouth or bowel cancer symptoms to decide to get checked out doctors.

Social marketing is defined as applying commercial marketing techniques to populations of society to encourage them to engage in positive social changes, such as becoming interested in their own help.

© Adfero Ltd