Website of the Department of Health

The Department of Health has devised a new marketing strategy targeting smokers in routine and manual (R & M) occupations to contribute to the Public Service Agreement (PSA) target relating to this group, which is to reduce prevalence to 26% or less by 2010.

There are around 4 million R & M smokers and although they are not a ‘hard to reach’ audience they are harder to ‘convert’ to non-smokers, due to many factors relating to their lives, and their attitudes and behaviours around smoking.

In order to reduce smoking prevalence in this group three overarching marketing objectives have been defined, which are:

• To trigger action
• To make quitting easier
• To reinforce motivation

All marketing communications activities will support one or more of these. Five major tasks have been identified, which together should enable the objectives to be met. These are:

• Acquisition and lead generation: to stimulate quit attempts and drive significant volumes to all the NHS response channels (e.g. website or helpline). Marketing activity would include direct response advertising, direct mail, door drops, search engine marketing, field and event marketing, mass action events such as ‘The Big Quit’. These activities will be used to drive responses.
• Stakeholder activation: to use third party influencers to generate quit attempts amongst R & M smokers, who can be reached in environments inaccessible to commercial media. Stakeholders include healthcare professionals, employers and community representatives. Marketing activity would include representation at conferences, PR in trade magazines, regular updates on national campaigns, influencing education and training syllabuses, toolkits.
• Lead management and conversion: to ‘convert’ those responses generated from the acquisition activity into successful quit attempts, through a customer relationship marketing programme, and improved interaction with the NHS Smoking Helpline and other response vehicles. Marketing activity would include improvements to the response vehicles, development of new online tools, further helpline advisor training, better data sharing with local Stop Smoking Services.
• Product development: to enhance and develop the NHS support offering for quitters, through exploration of a telephone-based intervention, and a workplace product, for example.
• Reinforcing motivation: to drive the desire to quit, using advertising, PR, sponsorship and partnership to provide reasons for both stopping smoking, and positive reasons for wanting to become smokefree.

If you are a Health Care Professional or would like further information on ongoing media/education campaigns please visit http://gosmokefree.nhs.uk/extranet/resources/