Overweight and obesity are among the United States’ most important public health threats in the United States. Many stakeholders including government officials and businesses, scientific researchers, medical and health professionals, educators, and community-based organizations, are focusing on this complex problem. All of these entities have important roles to play in communicating with consumers.
To explore the role of communications in addressing the complex issue of weight management and to come up with better strategies and messages health professionals and educators could use in communicating with consumers, the International Food Information Council Foundation convened a special meeting of stakeholder groups in December 2004 in Washington, DC. The conference participants included 80 opinion leaders representing government agencies, research institutions, health, nutrition and physical activity professional organizations, and food, beverage, and agricultural companies participated.
The Current Environment = Information Overload
The conference began with an overview of the public health threats associated with rising levels of overweight and obesity and a look at the current communication environment as seen through the eyes of consumers.
Today, more nutrition, weight management, and health information is probably communicated to consumers than at any point in modern history. These messages come from many sources, including the media, Internet advertisements, government agencies, neighbors and friends, health professionals, educators, coaches, and others.
One measure of this dramatic increase is the growth in obesity-related news stories in print media in the United States and other English-speaking parts of the world as tracked by the International Food Information Council Foundation. Over the past 6 years, the number of obesity-related stories increased by 336 percent.
However, during this period of increasing public awareness and interest in weight management and health, the number of Americans who are overweight or obese continued to climb.
Why this Disconnect?
To better understand consumers’ knowledge and underlying attitudes in this area, the participants were offered a summary of 10-years’ worth of findings from consumer research on nutrition, health, and weight management. Conclusions from a series of focus group interviews conducted by the IFIC Foundation in 2003 and 2004 were included in this summary. A full copy of this report is available at http://www.ific.org/research/obesityres.cfm. Conference participants then discussed these findings and their potential implications for improving consumer weight management messages in breakout sessions.
The consensus findings from these breakout discussions fell into three categories:
- Current communications are not connecting with consumers: Surprisingly, consumers seem to have a fairly good idea of what to do about managing their weight but they can’t or don’t know how to motivate themselves to act accordingly. In other words, they are not putting their knowledge into practice. In order to begin motivating consumers, stakeholders agreed that communication must be designed both to connect with the everyday lives and concerns of consumers and to reach them at an emotional, and potentially more motivational, level as well.
- Communications need to address perceived lifestyle challenges: Conference participants recognized that weight management and health messages need to acknowledge and address the lifestyle challenges that consumers face every day. Each individual and family deals with lifestyle issues differently. Consumers don’t think about nutrition, they think about their lifestyle. They need to know how to incorporate weight management and health into their lives while still meeting their family’s needs.
- Health, while important, is not a top priority. Health, with its many meanings, is not a motivator or a top priority for consumers. Similarly, terms like “nutrition,” “calories,” and “energy balance” do not resonate with consumers. Stakeholders left the conference with the understanding that messages need to be designed to appeal to consumers in a broad, comprehensive way that communicates specific, practical tips that consumers can incorporate into their daily lives.
In order to help consumers adopt new food and physical activity behaviors, attendees agreed that messages need to be “real” so that they are perceived as relevant and helpful to consumers as they struggle to manage the challenges of their day-to-day lives.
Working Together: The Benefits of Collaboration
The breakout groups also considered the potential benefits and feasibility of collaborating to help improve the communication environment. Looking at it from a consumer’s point of view, the participants agreed that the environment would be less confusing and more helpful if more information outlets were saying the same thing.
One way to achieve this would be for stakeholders in the obesity communication environment to work together to promote fewer but more overarching messages that have been consumer-tested. Many participants reacted positively to this approach, and discussed examples of partnerships they thought had successfully used a broad base of support to promote a unified message including Fight BAC® (www.fightbac.org) and the Dietary Guidelines Alliance’s It’s All About You program).
Collaboration could also provide a way for stakeholders to pool each group’s limited resources so that the few overarching messages could be repeated more frequently and over a longer period of time. While the details of developing collaborative partnerships need to be worked out, participants seemed enthusiastic about the potential effectiveness of this approach.
Finally, stakeholders could collaborate in the fielding of additional consumer research. New consumer research is needed to find ways and messages to encourage consumers to adopt healthful lifestyles. In particular, this research could yield new insights into how to personalize weight management information so that it empowers people to overcome perceived barriers such as lack of time because of their busy lifestyles.
A First Step
Feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive. While each participant’s organization was working hard to address weight management and health issues with its own messages and programs, there was a strong interest in meeting again to explore opportunities to collaborate. In the words of one participant: “Thanks for bringing us together on this important topic.”
