Promoting Reproductive Health for Young Adults through Social Marketing and Mass Media

From the Introduction

”Over the past decade, techniques of modern marketing and mass communications have been used with increasing success to promote the reproductive health of young adults in different countries. These efforts harness marketing's ability to analyse target audience behaviour and use the media's persuasive power to support health-enhancing objectives.

This paper reviews the application of these "social marketing" approaches to strengthen reproductive health practices among young adults. It summarises the analytical literature and lessons learned from relevant projects; describes key elements of successful project design, implementation, and evaluation; and identifies a set of critical research questions that need to be addressed to enhance the effectiveness of future interventions.

The paper is intended for use as an analytical tool and reference guide for the research and evaluation and programme staff of USAID's FOCUS on Young Adults programme, and as a resource document for USAID Cooperating Agencies (CAs) and other organisations working to strengthen the effectiveness of reproductive health programmes for young adults. It is one in a series of four complementary technical papers on the state-of-the-art of young adult reproductive health interventions that the FOCUS programme has commissioned. The three other papers cover school-based programmes, health facility programmes, and outreach programmes.

The term "social marketing" is intended here to refer to a process for designing health-promotion interventions that utilises techniques drawn from commercial advertising, market research, and the social sciences. (Key elements in such a process are described in Section 3 of this paper.) Social marketing strategies can be used to achieve a variety of health promotion objectives, including: increased use of health-related products, such as condoms, increased access to health services, and changes in health behavior and practices, e.g. the practice of abstinence or having sex with a single partner.

This paper focuses on how social marketing has been applied to support sound reproductive health practices among unmarried young adults, ages 10-24, in developing countries.

The following seven points highlight key principles, discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this paper, that have been shown to be critical to good project design.

• Effective interventions address not only the behavioral issues of young adults themselves, but also environmental factors and social norms that greatly influence young adult reproductive health behavior.
• Effective interventions address not only the behavioral issues of young adults themselves, but also environmental factors and social norms that greatly influence young adult reproductive health behavior.
• Young adults need to be involved in all aspects of social marketing reproductive health interventions.
• Media advocacy activities are an important complement to social marketing interventions.
• Pretesting of all messages is essential, especially those transmitted through mass media channels of communication.
• Relevant supportive networking and training activities need to be carried out throughout the life of the project.
• All major projects should include a well designed evaluation component.

The paper is based on an extensive review of the literature on young adult programs which utilize mass media and/or social marketing approaches to address issues of reproductive health. Sources of information include published and unpublished evaluations of social marketing and communications projects, journal articles, abstracts, working papers and workshop summaries, chapters of books and on-line literature, as well as personal communications with researchers and program experts.... The selection of project literature for review was based mainly on the availability of projects with documented outcome evaluations. Therefore, project descriptions that did not include documentation of impact were necessarily excluded."

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