Social Marketing and Community Health Promotion

Abstract

There is a long history of failure among social programs using mass media as their major sources of intervention. Health promotion programs, a subset of these social campaigns, have also failed to live up to their potential. In fact, a commonly held belief is that the mass media are impotent in changing health habits and promoting new health behaviors. Searching the literature on health promotion programs using mass media, one is at a loss to find more than a small handful of examples of campaigns that have even approximated their originally stated objectives. The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program’s (SHDPP) Three Community Study was initiated in 1972 to test, in realistic field settings, the potential for the use of community-based approaches in health promotion.