Walk to School Conference: Chris Holmes

Marketing Active Travel - the lessons that can be learnt from the National Obesity Social Marketing Campaign.
Chris Holmes, National Social Marketing Centre

Chris's was a great presentation to open the event. He really got everyone thinking about marketing behaviour change, and what it is that we are trying to do with the Walk to School campaign. His background is in food marketing, but he is now working on marketing healthy eating, and physical activity to families.

Key to his approach is getting insight into the people we are trying to influence. In particular, asking them may not be the best approach. Imagine asking someone how they travel to school. There are three possible answers for each person:

• What they think you want to hear (the "right" behaviour)
• What they actually think they do (their perceived behaviour)
• What they actually do (their actual behaviour).

These three could be very different!

Chris and his colleagues have done a lot of research for the Department for Health looking at the behaviour of almost 3000 families, to look for the similarities and differences. This included researchers actually living with families for 72 hours to find out what people actually do (not what they think they do!). They then segmented families by their beliefs, actions and opinions, rather than by demographic information (age, sex etc). These six segments are being finalised, along with tips as to the most important drivers for their behaviour, and I will share the final results on this blog when I have them.

The important messages, for us as campaigners, were:

• Parents predominantly want "happy" children. They equate "healthy" with being "not ill", rather than being "unfit".
• "Healthy" is seen as a negative word by some - suggesting unhappy (what kid wants to eat "healthy" food?) and (for some) middle class.
• No one likes being told what to do. Parents will, in some cases, rebel against "the man, telling us what to do". Chris illustrated this point with the parents passing burgers through the gate when Jamie Oliver introduced healthy school dinners. Someone in the audience mentioned that, since climate change and green issues have moved up the political agenda, she has found it harder to get parents to join her walking bus - again for the same reason.

He suggested the hooks we should look at are:

• Happy Kids - rather than "healthy kids"
• Socialising - children walking and talking with their friends, and with their parents.
• Magic moments - lots of parents in their research mentioned "magic moments" as part of their own memories of physical activity (walking to school with their parents, playing football with their parents).

I have tried to summarise a very in-depth and hugely interesting presentation in not very many words! If you were at the conference I would be interested to hear your comments on what Chris had to say. Also, if you have any further questions for him, I will collect them up and we could perhaps ask them to him as a group.