Blog 1: Externalise the problem

We encourage you to share this blog privately with your trusted professional network of health promotion peers. However, we would request that you don’t share it on LinkedIn or other publicly accessible social media channels, which could be visible to representatives from unhealthy industry groups.

If health promotion advocates want to increase support for the solutions we’re advancing, we must first understand how people think about the problems we’re trying to address.

One of the key findings of a recent message research project conducted by VicHealth and Common Cause Australia found the key difference between people who support health promotion and those who don’t, is the degree to which they believe individuals are to blame for their own health issues.

When supporters of health promotion think about the causes of ill-health they blame environmental factors such as industry marketing, misleading product labels, lack of access to healthy food or safe walking paths. In other words, environmental factors over which most people have little control.

Those opposed to health promotion, on the other hand, place the blame for preventable illnesses squarely on individuals and the choices they have made in life. In their view, people have to take responsibility for their own choices and put up with the consequences. It’s not the role of government or anyone else to tell adults how to live their lives.

Indeed, our research found the ‘choice’ frame is used consistently by industries across the board that profit from selling unhealthy products - from processed foods to alcohol. The concepts of choice and responsibility are littered throughout all of their public messaging. Whether they are opposing mandatory food labelling or minimum prices for alcoholic products - it’s always about personal choice.

What did surprise us, is that most health promotion advocates themselves are also tapping into this choice frame on a regular basis. For example, one common phrase used prolifically in health promotion is: “Making the healthy choice the easy choice”. It’s a catch-phrase in which the concept of choice is raised not once, but twice, which buys straight into the industry’s frame.

So, if we don’t talk about healthy choices, what should we talk about?

To begin with, our research clearly showed we should be talking much more about options than choices. This subtle shift in language moves the focus from individuals to their environment.

More broadly, whenever we’re describing the problem we’re trying to address through health promotion, we need to define this in terms of the external barriers individuals face to living healthy lives.

Here are a few examples of this shift in practice:

From: Australians are eating and drinking themselves sick.

To: The products marketed and sold by the processed food industry are making Australians sick.

 

From: For a lot of women, it’s a lack of confidence and fear of judgement that’s been stopping them getting active.

To: For a lot of women, it’s the judgement they face from others that has stopped them being active.

 

From: Increasing the minimum price of alcohol will help drinkers make more responsible choices.

To: Setting a minimum price for alcoholic products sold in Australia will reduce the harms they cause.

 

In our testing, we found externalising the problem in this way significantly boosted support for a variety of health promotion policies and programs.

Want more information?

Visit Common Cause Australia to find out more about their work and the concept behind values-based messaging.

Contact Mark Chenery at Common Cause if you have further questions about this work.