2010: Change4Life, Launching New Brands: Case Study

Snapshot

The Change4Life brand was developed to target childhood obesity and promote a healthier lifestyle and has already made a measurable difference in attitudes and actions.

Key insights

• The Department of Health (DoH) marketing team realised that getting mothers to change the way they raised and nourished their young children would require an enticing carrot rather than a preachy stick.
• The resulting integrated campaign from M&C Saatchi created a new and colourful brand, Change4Life, and a number of flexible sub-brands which local and national partners could use and adapt.
• New products and services were developed to motivate families to change behaviours, while the most at-risk were enrolled in a customer relationship management programme to offer additional support.

Summary

On current trends 90% of adults will be overweight or obese by 2050, putting them at significantly greater risk of ill health and dying early. In response to this, the DoH embarked on an anti-obesity movement. The scale of the task was huge and the DoH did not believe that a traditional government information campaign would achieve this.

Instead, marketing resources were used to inspire and brand a societal movement, Change4Life, in which everyone who could help, including community leaders, teachers, health professionals, charities, leisure centres, retailers and food manufacturers, could play a part. The three-year marketing campaign, which began in January 2009, aims to prevent childhood obesity by helping change the diets and physical activity patterns of children who are at risk of becoming obese.

The campaign goal was for 200,000 families to join this movement in the first twelve months. By the end of the first year well over 413,000 had joined Change4Life.

A ticking time bomb

The rise in childhood obesity is one of the greatest health challenges facing society. Already, 30% of children and 60% of adults are overweight or obese. If the trend is allowed to continue, by 2050 only one in ten of the adult population will be a healthy weight.

Obesity is not a cosmetic issue. Becoming overweight or obese increases an individual’s likelihood of developing (among others) cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, leading to reduced quality of life and, in some cases, lives cut short. The cost to society of obesity-related illness is forecast to reach £50 billion per annum by 2050 at today’s prices. Childhood obesity is particularly worrying, since there is a ‘conveyor belt effect’ whereby the majority of obese children grow up to be obese adults.

Change4Life was set up to combat this (Figure 1).It involved a complex array of issues:

• Creating a segmentation to allow resources to be targeted to those families who most need help.
• Providing insight into why those families behaved as they did.
• Creating a new brand identity.
• Providing ‘products’ (handbooks, questionnaires, wall charts, snack swappers) that families could use to change their behaviours.
• Signposting them to services (such as dance classes, accompanied walks and free swimming) and bringing together a coalition of local, non-governmental and commercial sector organisations to help families change their behaviours.

What the department realised was that preventing childhood obesity required fundamental changes to the way families raised and nourished their children: the food they bought, how they prepared it, when and how much they ate, how they travelled and how they spent their leisure time. Expert opinion was that to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, children needed to:

• Reduce their intake of fat, particularly saturated fat (marketed as ‘Cut Back Fat’).
• Reduce their intake of added sugar (‘Sugar Swaps’).
• Eat smaller portion sizes (‘Me-Size Meals’).
• Eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables per day (‘5 A Day’).
• Have three regular mealtimes each day (‘Meal Time’).
• Reduce the number of snacks they eat (‘Snack Check’).
• Do at least 60 minutes of moderate intensity activity during each day (‘60 Active Minutes’).
• Reduce time spent in sedentary activity (‘Up and About’).

Before the launch of Change4Life, only 16% of mothers claimed that their children exhibited all of these behaviours.

Designing an effective campaign

In its first year, Change4life focused on families with children aged 5-11, especially those (identified via quantitative segmentation) whose self-reported attitudes and behaviours suggested that their children were at increased risk of becoming obese.

While 93% of these families saw childhood obesity as a problem for society, only 5% recognised that their own children were at risk. Parents viewed weight as a cosmetic rather than a health issue and seldom welcomed government advice on how
to raise their children.

Change4Life supported the government’s public service agreement (PSA) target to reduce the proportion of obese children to 2000 levels by 2020. Modelling indicated that, in order to meet the target, 200,000 families would be needed to commit to changing their behaviours through Change4Life by the end of the first year — of whom at least 33,333 families had to stay in the programme for at least six months.

Other published targets for the first year of activity were set, including reach, awareness, response, sign-ups and continued interaction with the programme.

For families to trial and sustain changes to their lifestyles, they needed powerful motivation, coupled with access to services and support. A traditional government information campaign wouldn’t be able to do this. Instead, marketing resources were used to inspire a societal movement, through which everyone who could help, including community leaders, teachers, health professionals, charities, leisure centres, retailers and food manufacturers, could play their part in bringing about change.

Birth of a new brand
A new brand, Change4Life, was created by M&C Saatchi (along with a suite of sub-brands, such as Walk4Life, Cook4Life and Play4Life). Change4Life launched to the public in January 2009 with an integrated communications campaign, comprising national advertising and public relations (PR), bus stop posters (Figure 3), supported by a website (including a locally-searchable directory of services) and a helpline.

The Change4Life brand and its sub-brands were made available to local and national partners, so that they could market their own products and services (such as accompanied walks, free swimming, gym sessions, dance classes, new play facilities, healthy school meals, recipe books and cooking classes) within the movement.

Families were invited to join Change4Life. When they joined, they were sent a questionnaire (called How Are The Kids?) that asked about a typical day in the life of each child. This enabled Change4Life to send them a personalised action plan with advice for each child (Figure 4).

New products and offers were developed to prompt behaviour change. For example 250,000 ‘snack swapper ‘ wheels were distributed to help parents negotiate with their children about healthier snacking and seven million free swims were provided by local authorities. 200,000 of the most at-risk families were enrolled in a customer relationship management programme which provided additional continued support.

A significant outcome
The campaign exceeded all published targets, as Table 1 shows.

The campaign helped parents make the link between the behaviours that cause excess weight gain and poor health outcomes. For example:

• 85% of mothers agreed that the Change4Life advertising “made me think about my children’s health in the long term”.
• 81% agreed it “made me think about the link between eating healthily and disease”.
• 83% agreed that it “made me think about the link between physical activity and disease”.

Brand metrics were strong, especially when it came to being clear, trusted, relevant, adaptable to my lifestyle and supportive, not judgemental.

Getting everyone on board

Change4Life galvanised activity across communities. For example:

• 25,000 community leaders joined Change4Life as local supporters and used Change4Life materials to start conversations with over a million people about their lifestyles.
• 44% of primary schools, children’s centres, hospitals, GP surgeries, town halls, leisure centres and libraries displayed Change4Life materials.
• NHS staff ordered over six million leaflets and posters to distribute to the public.
• 183 national organisations (including Asda, Tesco, Unilever, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Nintendo and the Fitness Industry Association) spent their own money marketing Change4Life and supported the movement by, for example, selling bikes at cost, providing money-off fruit and vegetables and funding free exercise sessions.
• Primary schools generated over 50,000 sign-ups to Change4Life and created Change4Life-themed assemblies, lessons and healthy school menus.
• Local authorities and primary care trusts joined the initiative up with their own activities and created new ones, such as street parties and road shows, in support of Change4Life.
• Other government departments synchronised their activity and created new activity under Change4Life sub-brands (such as Swim4Life, Play4Life and Muckln4Life).
• Three of the main health charities (Cancer Research UK, Diabetes UK and the British Heart Foundation) ran their own campaign in support of Change4Life and other non-governmental organisations, such as Natural England and Sustrans, also supported the campaign.

Changing behaviours

Early results indicated that families were already changing their behaviours. In the tracking study, 30% of mothers who saw the advertising (equating to over a million mothers) claimed to have changed at least one thing in their children’s diets or activity levels as a direct result of Change4Life.

Encouragingly, the number of mothers claiming that their children did all eight of the Change4Life behaviours increased from 16% at the baseline of January 2009 to 20% a year later. This equated to 180,000 more families claiming to do all eight behaviours. The proportion of families claiming to do at least four of the behaviours also increased from 77% to 83%.

While it’s true that mothers may have claimed that their children did behaviours when they didn’t, parental claims were backed up by sales data provided by commercial partners in the case of food-related behaviours:

• BrandScience analysed data from 7,000 households that were both on the SkyView panel and the TNS family food panel. The analysis compared the ratio of purchases between a selection of typically less healthy products (e.g. full-fat milk and cakes) with typically more healthy products (e.g. fruit and vegetables and pasta) for the full year 2009 and the full year 2008. Brand Science found that the ratio of healthy to unhealthy products improved significantly among C2DE families with children who had high exposure to the Change4Life advertising campaign. Penetration of healthier products increased by 20% in these households and volume of healthier products increased by 9%.
• dunnhumby analysed actual purchases (using the Tesco Clubcard database) of 10,000 of the families who were most engaged with Change4Life. The analysis compared purchases made at Tesco during September, October and November 2009 with the same three months of 2008 (i.e. pre-Change4Life). To factor out the impact of pricing and sales promotion, dunnhumby created a control group of 10,000 non-Change4Life families who were demographically comparable and whose purchasing in 2008 matched the intervention group. The analysis found a significant difference in the purchasing behaviour of the intervention group relative to the control. Specifically, Change4Life families bought more low-sugar drinks, more low-fat milk, more fruit and vegetables, more dried pasta and fewer cakes relative to the control.

Achieving cost effectiveness

The Central Office of Information’s Artemis tool holds data for 54 government campaigns and enables government departments to assess the cost effectiveness of their activity. As Table 2 shows, How Are The Kids? (HATK) was the most cost-effective response mechanism in government.

The DoH committed £75 million to the first three years of Change4Life. In addition to the free activity provided by local authorities, the NHS and community groups, the Change4Life movement attracted significant funding from partners such
as, for example:

• £1.5 million from other government departments.
• £9 million spent by national partners.
• £12.5 million in free media space for the launch.
• £500,000 in free media with the sponsorship of Channel 4’s The Simpsons.
• £200 million in future commitments by the Business4Life consortium.

Collectively, these gave a return on investment of £2.98 for every £1 spent. But the ultimate return on investment will be experienced in 2050, when children who avoid obesity today do not develop obesity-related illness, such as type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease in middle age, potentially saving society £50 billion per annum.

Entries for the 2013 Awards for Excellence are now open, now is the time to choose the category you would like to enter.