Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating

1. Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating
Social
Marketing
Campaign
Pap Paper by Karishma Sinha, Corporate Social Impact, Date November 10 2009
Social Marketing Campaign: Whole Foods, the world’s largest natural food retailer, enjoys a reputation of being
a progressive trendsetter at the forefront of a green lifestyle revolution in American Life. I propose a social
marketing program around eating healthy, as run by Whole Foods. It will leverage their reputation to
contribute to preventing obesity and maintaining healthy weight by helping overweight individuals adopt and
maintain healthy nutritional practices. The campaign will be part of the bigger wholefoods movement of
spreading awareness around green, organic foods to drive sustainable change towards obese communities.
Value Proposition:
A. Name of the campaign: ‘Bring on the goodness of wholesome eating’- The campaign will extend Whole
Foods franchise by marketing recipes of healthy private label products to needy communities.
B. Target Audience: The campaign will aim at changing behavior of three distinct consumer segments. Primary
School Age Obese Children, the Pregnant Mothers, and the overweight medium to low socio-economic
households community(Hispanics, Chinese, Indians), suffering from mid-life crisis and low self-esteem.
Rationale behind the consumer segments: The earlier the healthy eating patterns are instilled the more likely
they are to be maintained throughout life, and therefore the primary school children will be healthier and less at
risk of lifestyle diseases, e.g. diabetes and heart attack. A child who is overweight has a greater chance of
becoming an overweight adult. A teen with "baby" fat has a 75 percent-plus chance of becoming overweight.
Primary school children will have a ripple effect on others in the family i.e younger children, teenagers, and
parents. Focus on pregnant obese women will lay the foundation for a healthy eating lifestyle. Immigrants from
low socio-economic household income community suffer from cultural variations around types of food eaten.
Whole Foods can aim at reducing the effect of cultural drivers on obesity by educating about the green revolution.
Scale of the campaign: Shrink the change by targeting small yet achievable audience. To target 30% of children,
who are spread around four states (the states that are marked high on obesity). The four states with alarming
levels of obesity include Mississippi, Alabama (31.2 percent), West Virginia (31.1 percent), and Tennessee (30.2
percent).
Overall Approach and Tactics:
1. Theoretical Context around ‘the wholesome campaign’: The wholesome eating campaign will be
constructed around two theories. One, is the Implementation Intentions Theory that will be useful for
encouraging repetitive behavior. Eating healthy will be similar to running a marathon (similar to Godiva
Relay race). The target audience will set time and place to start by practicing healthy portion of eating at regular
intervals. The campaign will show pictures of the journey rather than the end goal. Second, is Persuasion
Knowledge Model. It will recognize skepticism around eating unhealthy. The campaign can do counter
marketing by spreading negative message around eating nutrition deficient food.
2. Marketing Objectives and Goals:
Branding and Creative Idea: The tone of the campaign will be credible and persuasive yet humorous. Refer
Appendix 1 for the humorous themes appealing to identities of obese people. Some of the big ideas talk about
‘You are what you eat’. Also the greenness of Whole Foods can be emphasized by creating sponsorships
and cross-promotions between buying a vegetable and green technologies- Eg. Eat Spinach and win a Green
Laptop by Apple. The message will be values based rather than prescriptive.

2. Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating
Social
Marketing
Campaign
Pap Paper by Karishma Sinha, Corporate Social Impact, Date November 10 2009
Product: Core Product Benefits: The campaign will not only communicate the change but reward the change
through incentives. The campaign will be linked directly to actual products sales of 365 Everyday Value, the
private label of Whole Foods.
Augmented Product Benefits: 1) Cause Marketing – Every unit sold of the 365 Everyday Value brand will
trigger a donation to the cause of obesity. 2) Green Marketing- the wholesome eating campaign will be in sync
with the company’s corporate vision of environmental friendliness 3) Cause Sponsorship- The brand will enter
into sponsorship agreements with other labels such as Kellogg, Unilever to help create funds for supporting the
cause.
Price and Promotion: The budget could be small and focus on small-scale events such as improving nutrition
in schools and early childhood centers, Student health promotion, Youth focused websites.
Channels: Hispanic TV, Children TV Channels- Disney, Nickelodeon, Health Magazines. Tap school network,
community gathering, sports groups, poor population pockets within the 4 identified states, radio advertisement,
and public speaking engagements.
NGO Partnership: Whole Foods can create partnership with the American Heart Association to co-manage
the Social Marketing Campaign of ‘Wholesome eating’. Open dialogue with influencers from the NGO to
promote cause sponsorship around the campaign.
3. Stakeholders Analysis and net impact of the campaign:
Since the campaign is linked to product sales of organic food, and cause sponsorship, it will create positive
financial and social outcome. Positive implies positive impact of the campaign on the bottom-line. Also the
campaign will enable investors and shareholders to be happy as it would push Whole Foods private label.
Regulators will not influence Whole Foods as much as they would influence NGOs. Local Communities will
create positive bottomline impact by influencing the reputation of the brand.
Consumers Investors Regulators Employees Local Communities
Bottom Line
Social Positive Positive
Less
Pressure
compared to
NGOs (No
Impact) Positive Positive
Bottom Line
Environmental Positive Positive No Impact Positive Positive
Bottom Line
Financial
Negative
(discounting
can create
negative
impact) Positive No Impact Positive
5% of Whole Foods
After Tax Profits to
NGOs
4. Stages of Activation of the Campaign:

3. Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating
Social
Marketing
Campaign
Pap Paper by Karishma Sinha, Corporate Social Impact, Date November 10 2009
The key message around Wholesome Eating is to create simple everyday changes in behaviour, based on
practical steps that will improve health and make audience feel more positive. After the first wave of TV and
Radio Advertisements it is critical to use below the line approaches to reinforce the social marketing messages.
For Whole Foods to help drive the change persuasively, they need to link their corporate social responsibilities
to the different stages of the campaign.
Stage 1- Pre-Launch: Work on (obesity)cause related donations to charities to promote corporate citizenship
(traditional do-gooding)
Stage 2- Launch: Create social enhancement for the company by communicating social benefits related to
Whole Foods Products. Create promotional campaign by promoting five minutes recipes that stress the
importance of starchy foods, fruit and vegetables, fish etc.
Stage 3-Accelerate the campaign: Focus on Whole Foods social transformation by adding new offerings.
Create cross-promotions with other brands, green products to stimulate demand for the 365 brand.
Stage 4-Focus on Scalability: SCALERS – increase staffing, improve the communication, focus on alliance-
building with a lot of Food companies such as Kellogg, Kraft, Unilever, Danone, focus on lobbying, earnings-
generation, replicating, and stimulating market forces to scale up the campaign.
5. Barriers to the campaign and Recommended Actions:
There could be several barriers to the campaign. Some of the earlier social marketing campaigns around eating
healthy, such as Fiber consumption program by Kellogg, could only be successful due to the extensive exposure
given to the campaign. The food pyramid campaign by the Government was unsuccessful due to the lack of
clarity and low-engagement levels of the pyramid with the audience. Some of the possible barriers to ‘Goodness
of Wholesome Eating’ campaign might be:
1. Information overload to the target audience. Since they would be target for many programs with
different and competing messages, the campaign might not leave a long-lasting impact on them.
2. Lack of knowledge and skills to prepare healthy food.
3. Cost of a healthy diet: For the poor target pockets, there could be lack of money to allocate to expensive
food from Whole Foods, lack of refrigerator to store perishable food, and the inability to afford repeat
purchase.
4. Conflict of interest between the government run campaigns with that of WholeFoods.

4. Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating
Social
Marketing
Campaign
Pap Paper by Karishma Sinha, Corporate Social Impact, Date November 10 2009
APPENDIX 1

5. Bring on the Goodness of Healthy Eating
Social
Marketing
Campaign
Pap Paper by Karishma Sinha, Corporate Social Impact, Date November 10 2009