National Social Marketing Centre

Our time in Hong Kong is now coming to an end, with John completing the final presentation to the Department of Health (DH) earlier today. The month here has really flown by in a haze of training workshops, scoping interviews, stakeholder engagement and more. It has been an intense month, but the local project team have done an amazing job picking up and applying the social marketing concepts. Even in this short timeframe, we feel we've provided some valuable insights and practical ideas for the DH taskforce to work with as they move forward in the coming months.

In our last post, we promised to talk about some of the differences between the UK and Hong Kong in the reasons why women choose not to breastfeed, and why health professionals do not support it. The most striking is the role of mothers-in-law.

There has been much discussion of marketing, government and the commercial sector recently. Last week, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) launched its white paper Don't Stop Me Now: Marketing in Central Government. It defended government marketing and argued that there should be more of it. Then, at the weekend, The Guardian reported that five 'responsibility deal' networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, have been set up to come up with policies, including those on public health.

After an 11-hour flight from the Big Smoke, we landed in the Big Smog. It's great to be back in Hong Kong and we're thrilled to be here working on a partnership project with the city's Department of Health (DH).

Apparently this is the first project in Hong Kong (and hopefully the first of many!) that will use social marketing systematically from start to finish. Our task is to apply a social marketing approach to increase compliance amongst health professionals with the forthcoming Hong Kong Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes (the Code). 74% of babies are breastfed at birth, but at 4-6 months, only 31% are still being breastfed at all (and 13.7% exclusively breastfed).

One of the key contributing factors to these low rates is aggressive marketing of breast milk substitutes. Infant formula companies heavily promote their products not only to the public (advertising on TV, giving free gifts to mothers, hosting mother-baby clubs, etc), but also to health professionals (offering free samples, providing promotional and information materials, sponsoring conferences and activities for doctors, etc).

Today I'm at the Riders Training School to learn the motorbike techniques that enable health professionals to ride in the very harsh conditions they're going to meet in the bush.

Just finished my three-day marketing workshop and I'm absolutely whacked. It's been a great experience though and the people have been fantastic.

I'm in Zimbabwe at the moment, giving a social marketing workshop to Riders for Health staff (www.riders.org).

Sometimes, I feel as though we 'get' social marketing in this country.

The last 12 months have seen social marketing projects scoop highly-prestigious awards. Bangor University's excellent Food Dudes took gold in the Chief Medical Officer's Public Health Awards 2010. Heart of Birmingham PCT and Birmingham City Council achieved the ultimate accolade at 2009's HSJ Awards, with Gym for Free winning the Secretary of State's Award for Excellence in Healthcare Management. It's a testament to how far we've come.

But we shouldn't be complacent. Despite great successes in some sectors – notably health – there is still work to be done in promoting and proving social marketing's potential.