Health Branding:: Evidence and Case Studies of a Growing Prevention Strategy

Branding is the foremost approach to commercial product and service communication and marketing. Brands create mental representations in the minds of consumers and thereby build relationships between consumers and products and services by providing beneficial exchanges. Brands such as Nike with its signature ‘Just Do It’ tagline and branding of an active lifestyle have used this approach.

Brand representations can similarly be built between behaviors and consumers. Similarly, health brands are based on mental representations of healthy behaviors. Brand equity is what the brand stands for in the hearts and minds of consumers, and as a metric it captures their identification with and intentions to purchase, use, and engage with the brand.  It has been validated as a predictor of consumer behavior. Research by the author has validated a health brand equity scale and found that it operates as a mediator of health behavior outcomes.

This paper covers three main topics. First, the author reviews recent experimental and quasi-experimental research on health branding. The author reviews evidence for the effects of branding on health behavior and for brand equity as a mediator of behavior change from the truth anti-smoking and Above the Influence anti-drug campaigns, and from condom use promotion campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa.

Second, the author briefly reports on a recent systematic review of the published literature on health branding. This research was operationalized as any manuscripts in the health, social science, and business literature on branding or brands in health promotion marketing. Some 69 article were included in the review, which builds on a previously published review by Evans and colleagues (2008) and concludes that health branding is growing, with some 32 newly published articles in the past 5 years, and reflects increasing rigor in design and evaluation.

Finally, the author reports on results of a recent NIDA-funded SBIR study to develop a self-guided online training tool to aid prevention scientists in using health branding. After briefly describing the tool and results of the SBIR study, the author discusses the potential to improve prevention programs using branding techniques. The presentation concludes with a scientific training and research agenda for health branding and a call for more experimental studies to build the growing evidence base and increase the use of branding in prevention programs.