Free essay on situation analysis

Obesity has recently become a real problem among children as well as adults. People neglect doctors’ advice on healthy nutrition and lifestyle. Instead they eat junk food and do not do any physical exercises. The most frightening fact is that children are more and more exposed to suffer from obesity and other related diseases due to advertising from junk food manufacturers. Bright and funny commercials and advertisements are silent about risks and threats of excessive unhealthy nutrition. As a result, this powerful media tool makes harm to many peoples’ health and should be tackled with the proper equivalent such as social marketing.
The social marketing would be an effective tool both for increasing peoples’ awareness of their healthy habits and risks relating to them and for advertising products of those manufacturers who care about their customers’ health. The main strength of social marketing is its ability to establish relationships with the target audience and deliver message within the shortest period of time. Well-thought and creative social marketing is able to persuade large amounts of people to accept what was suggested. The social marketing campaigns and seminars can foster development of favorable habits among the target auditory, provide information about the main symptoms of obesity and possible solutions. Moreover, mass media channels may become an effective tool of social marketing.
The social marketing may be met with poor fan engagement. This is the reason why some basically positive and healthy intentions might remain unrealized. People may show no interest to social marketing, instead giving preference to some other campaigns. The main task is to make social marketing campaign as interesting as it may be needed to compete with junk food manufacturers advertising. To avoid this weakness, the idea of social marketing should be promoted to the level of big corporations which would include it as a part of their ethical corporate responsibility.
The opportunity for the social marketing in fighting the problem of obesity is gaining support via social networks. The new era of technological development led to the fact that children are often pretty active in social networks. If the social marketing campaign is actively influencing the audience through the social networks, it can lead to far better result than just ordinary meetings. Online campaigns or webinars may involve larger auditory as well as new specialists who are more competent in the domain of tackling obesity problem. People are more likely to stay anonymous in this delicate question rather than admit having a problem and begin to attend campaigns. Thus social networks are the perfect opportunity for social marketing to expand its influence.
Insufficient funds may become a real threat for the social marketing as a project. Big corporations may include it as a part of their expenditures on the corporate responsibility issues and ethics. However, the social marketing should not be limited to companies which would definitely want to promote their brands even trying to make society more aware of the dangers of obesity. Thus the social marketing should be financed on the community level or even governmental level as a part of health care system. Healthier society will make country more successful in terms of production and development. That is why the concept of social marketing should receive due attention not only through the problem of obesity, but also as an effective tool of forming public opinion and distributing of information.