I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. I tripped over social marketing in public health, and now I can’t think of anything else. I’m watching a video lecture by Michael Rothschild, I bought the book Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide by Nedra Kline Weinreich, I am reading articles about how the “fear appeal” works and doesn’t work… It’s at the core of what I want to talk about in Forget Memory… “Social marketing works because it recognizes what people are actually looking for out of life. How to be popular, how to have fun. Public health marketing is hard because we’re telling people to stop doing all the things they love to do.” (Rothschild) It puts the marketing of Alzheimer’s awareness into context of many other awareness campaigns – binge drinking, smoking, HIV/AIDS, folic acid, obesity, early detection of various cancers. The hard part for Alzheimer’s and dementia is that the reward for early detection is…well…a bit nebulous.
