Obesity is a serious problem that has plagued generations of British society throughout the 21st century, and it is growing with destructive force in some regions. Much of this deviation from the weight norm is due to the uneven ratio between calorie intake and energy expenditure. To a significant extent, the problem of obesity, as studies show, can be called social since, for example, in Britain, it is historically associated with the end of the Second World War (Bivins, 2020). The obesity problem in Britain has a long history, and researchers note that as early as the 1970s, attempts were made to launch awareness-raising programs (Hand, 2020).
Campaigns to improve the health of the nation are conceptual projects consisting of coherent actions aimed at changing civic consciousness on the public health problem (Dogra et al., 2021). Such projects are created to prevent the risk of a decline in the collective health of society. The key indicators of the success of such projects are a specific timeline, a collected and declared budget with a clear estimate, and, most importantly, implementation supported by specific statistical data confirming long-term benefits.
The main objective of the activity carried out within the framework of the described company was the introduction of healthy food into the nutritional diet of children, which was generally implemented. The main problem faced by the project managers was in the form of those products themselves, which appear to be the opposite of healthy food. The type of fast food that is considered to be alternative and youth-oriented is outwardly brighter and also has tasted more attractive to children (Shabbir, 2016). Sweets, sugary soda and snacks, which are often targeted at children in their advertising positioning, are no less problematic.
Thus, the authors of the project were faced with the need to present worthy advertising content. The authors of the project need to create an equally catchy and attractive visual image in order to grab the child’s attention by distracting him from advertising junk food. The negative impact of media and advertising on the fragile minds of children is also complemented by the misperceptions of unhealthy foods in their parents (Naderer, 2021). The second major challenge for SnackRight was the fight against the common and dangerous stereotype that children need to buy junk food as pampering.
Within the framework of the campaign, primary and secondary tasks were announced, which include not only the deployment of the program at the public level but also the analytical fixation of the results. Thus, the strategy proposed by the authors of the program seems to be not only practically useful and generally valuable for society but also has scientific relevance. SnackRight is not just a volunteer and propaganda project but also a scientific project, the task of which is to obtain scientific evidence of the effectiveness of the experiment. The data recorded during the four weeks after the campaign can be used as an example of how such projects can and should receive funding and publicity.
A special statistical, computational model was designed to select the audience that could potentially most need to apply for such a health program. Realizing that obesity could become a plague for collective health in the future, the experiment focused on identifying and extinguishing the main foci of the problem. The campaign methodologists built a model that would take into account both obese cities and a high number of low-income families. Thus, through the combination of these statistics, areas of Britain were discovered in which low social conditions also formed the problem of unhealthy nutrition for children.
An important and perhaps even fundamental aspect of the advertising campaign is the fact that it is aimed not only at children but also at their parents. The project strategy is to first convince parents to involve children in activist events and festivals. Despite the fact that the project in its second phase was more focused on interaction with children, dialogue with parents seems to be primarily important in its own way.
Parental patterns of behavior and parenting systems are fundamental to achieving understanding with the child (Newman et al., 2019). It is parents who are able to understand how they can influence the health of their child and control his nutrition in a really long term. The connection between parents, children and institutions seems to be vain here because only with the harmonious interaction of these elements can the desired level of trust be achieved (Rodela and Bertrand, 2019). This gives the impression that the project covers all the required age groups. Probably, in a larger situation and with a larger advertising budget, the project could make an attempt to convey similar information to the demographic group of teenagers.
There is a possibility that the main strategical error was the distribution of advertising including branding only within festivals and events. Probably, first of all, the campaign should focus directly on children, who could be attracted by the vivid characters from the hand-drawn franchise developed as part of the campaign. The project initially focused on attracting parents instead of coming up with an advertising campaign so flamboyant that it could actually compete with fast food restaurant chains.
The time period of one year seems quite appropriate for such large-scale plans as those that were developed and implemented by the authors of the project. The campaign was deployed in two parts, with the second being grander in scale and attracting more people. Thus, the developers of the program had time to evaluate the results of the first part of the project and prepare a more perfect and large-scale second part. The break between the two stages of the project seems to be sufficient both to prepare a more efficient chain of actions and to disseminate information about the project in the interim.
Initial surveys were conducted among parents and their main task was to find out their impact on children’s nutrition and their level of awareness of the problem. Then the researchers focused on getting information from doctors and nutritionists to select the right target audience, that is, children from three to five. This selection method seems logical as it formulates the age group most vulnerable to healthy eating problems. The researchers used the psychoanalytic scientific apparatus so that parents were forced to explain for what reasons they allow or even encourage unhealthy nutrition for their children. The results can certainly be classified as confidential information, but their scientific value is extremely high. The scoring method used as a result of the campaign assessed the percentage of families who attended one of the events held, as a result, supported the rule of eating healthy food.
The information-gathering methods seem generally sound as they focus on documenting how the project has influenced the changes in the eating habits of the families involved. Therefore, for researchers of statistical data within the framework of the project, it was logically important to establish the percentage of how many families received some new ideas about healthy eating and how many actually applied these practices in their daily life.
At the same time, SnackRight also recorded how interesting and attractive to the audience the project itself, its branding and its support system are. Registering data on how many of the project participants eventually participated in interactive interaction with the project via web resources seems important in order to emphasize the need for modern project design. The only drawback of the collected statistics is perhaps the insufficient only four-week duration of long-term monitoring of the proper nutrition of the project participants.
Funding for this project was compiled at the macro and micro levels. Most of the project’s budget came from funds allocated by the Ministry of Health Fund, and a more modest part of the budget was invested by the directors of public health of the cities in which the campaigns were carried out. Such a financial strategy for obtaining grants seems to be quite logical since it makes it necessary to intervene at the federal level without requiring too many funds from the cities themselves. This seems logical because the problem of obesity is directly social and economic and its cause may, in essence, be the low budget and financial capabilities of a particular city or region (Marmot, 2020).
Thus, this health problem will be considered primarily at the state level, and it will be possible to develop a kind of collective program to support socially vulnerable regions. The money allocated by the organizations seems reasonable, but perhaps additional resources are required for long-term support of the project on social networks and on the Internet.
The data found in the framework of the two-phase SnackRight project should certainly attract the attention of the administrations of individual cities and, probably, federal institutions related to caring for children and low-income families. Financial support is required at the federal level in order to implement such a project on the scale of a huge country. At the same time, it should be noted that the data obtained as a result of fixing the results of the campaign have generally encouraged potential. The eating behavior of almost half of the children who took part in the project has changed for the better, which suggests a real need to deploy similar projects throughout Britain.
In the context of the analysis of the strategies of the SnackRight wellness project, the main conceptual approaches and their immediate relevance in the context of obesity as a large and alarming problem in Britain were structured and identified. An assessment of the financial policy of the project was carried out and the need to obtain funding directly from the state was confirmed due to the low income of especially problematic regions.
Certain shortcomings were found in the generally strong enough methodological apparatus developed by the project to collect information on the practical effectiveness of the campaign. Perhaps the project could use some design improvements to make it more competitive with bright advertisements for snacks and fast foods. The key recommendations are the obvious need to obtain more constant funding from the state and bring the project to the federal level.
Reference List
Bivins, R. (2020). ‘Weighing on us all? Quantification and cultural responses to obesity in NHS Britain’, History of Science, 58(2), pp. 216-242.
Dogra, S. A. et al. (2021). ‘Delivering a childhood obesity prevention intervention using Islamic religious settings in the UK: What is most important to the stakeholders?‘, Preventive Medicine Reports, 22. Web.
Hand, J. (2020) ‘”Look after yourself”: visualizing obesity as a public health concern in the 1970s and 1980s Britain’, in Jackson, M. and Moore, M. (Eds.) Balancing the self: medicine, politics and the regulation of health in the twentieth century. Manchester University Press.
Marmot, M. (2020) ‘Health Equity in England: the Marmot review 10 years on’, BMJ, 2020(368). Web.
Naderer, B. (2021) ‘Advertising unhealthy food to children: On the importance of regulations, parenting styles, and media literacy‘, Current Addiction Reports, 8, pp. 12-18. Web.
Newman, N., Northcutt, A., Farmer, A. and Black, B. (2019) ‘Epstein’s model of parental involvement: Parent perceptions in urban schools’. Language Teaching and Educational Research, 2(2), pp. 81-100. Web.
Rodela, K. C., and Bertrand, M. B. (2018) ‘Rethinking educational leadership in the margins: Youth, parent, and community leadership for equity and social justice‘, Journal of Research of Leadership Education, 13(1), pp. 3-9. Web.
Shabbir, M. S. (2016) ‘The impact of advertisement on buying behavior of the children’, Business Management Review, 6(4). Web.