In the medical community, it's a well-known and disturbing fact that diabetes disproportionately devastates minority populations. What continues to elude industry communicators is how to best reach these at-risk groups with relevant and effective prevention and disease management messages.
A joint initiative by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is tackling this public awareness challenge with culturally and linguistically relevant messages. This approach sets apart the National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) campaign targeting Hispanics and Latinos from other minority-targeted national diabetes efforts, according to Faye Wong, an NDEP program director. Wong says most communication efforts simply translate English messages into other languages without addressing cultural and linguistic issues.
Launched in June last year, NDEP's Hispanic/Latino campaign is the first in a series of efforts to target different minority populations, including African Americans, Asian Americans and American Indians.
The Hispanic campaign's theme, Tome su diabetes en serio para que no se vuelva cosa seria (Take your diabetes seriously, so that it does not become serious), addresses the sense of fatalism common among the Hispanic/Latino community and stresses ways to gain control of the disease using culturally-sensitive messages. For this community, diabetes is seen as a death sentence.
So far, the campaign developed by Prospect Associates in Silver Spring, Md. is getting major national media play. Public service announcements (PSAs) were sent to more than 250 Hispanic radio stations, 50 Hispanic TV stations and 75 newspapers and magazines. Six weeks after the official launch, the campaign reached more than 12.5 million people nationwide and media outlets request campaign materials on a weekly basis.
The campaign is filling a major public health void, providing a combination of high-quality creative and compelling minority-targeted messages about a disease that is the 6th leading cause of death among Hispanics and Latinos. It also has earned Prospect industry recognition with a Silver Mercury award from MerComm, Inc. and the 1998 Aescalapius Award for Excellence from the Health Improvement Institute.
Hispanic/Latino Work Group
To get the messaging right and assist with campaign development, NDEP tapped into a mix of traditional organizations (American Diabetes Association and American Association of Diabetes Educators) and non-traditional (National Council of LaRaza Hispanic Health Project and Puerto Rican Association of Diabetes Educators) partnership resources. Using non-traditional community-based partners was key to developing messages that would hit home with the Hispanic audience, Wong says. These partners formed a Hispanic/Latino Work Group to collaborate with Prospect on all aspects of the campaign, from message development to positioning.
"To develop culturally-relevant messages it was important not to take an ivory tower approach," says Lynda Bardfield, a creative director at Prospect. The work group offered invaluable insight on how the Hispanic/Latino community perceives diabetes and on what advertising themes would be most compelling, she said. Key attitudes and secondary market research about diabetes that shaped campaign messages include:
- Hispanics/Latinos have a strong sense that diabetes is inevitable and out of their control.
- Religion plays an important and central role in the Hispanic community.
- Traditional families emphasize interdependenc-e, so family connections are seen as a major motivation to live longer.
Creative That Thunders
The campaign targets Hispanics who have Type 2 Diabetes, which tends to affect people in their mid-40s and 50s. This targeting decision was not an easy one because the information needs of the Hispanic/Latino community about diabetes are so great. A key decision had to be made regarding whether to target the millions of undiagnosed Hispanics or to zero in on those who know they have diabetes but have not made efforts to control it. After spirited debate, the creative team chose the latter approach as the top campaign priority because those with the disease have a more urgent need for information.
After a series of focus groups in several geographic markets with a significant Hispanic population, the creative theme that put diabetes in a compelling, thought-provoking context was a thunderstorm. The advertising materials feature an image of lightening with copy that reads "Campana de educacion que motiva a las personas con diabetes a que la controlen" ("There are many things in life we can't control, fortunately diabetes isn't one of them.")
Messages for the campaign had to toe the line between the gravity of diabetes and the hope of survival, presented within a powerful and cultural framework that the thunderstorm analogy helps to convey, says Deborah Lurie, an account group head for Prospect.
The campaign continues to hit a nerve. In November, Prospect re-released campaign materials for National Diabetes Month. During this month, the campaign reached an average of 12 million TV viewers, an estimated 8.1 million radio listeners and an estimated 920,000 readers of newspapers and magazines.
(Prospect Associates, Deborah Lurie, Lynda Bardfield, 301/592-8600; CDC, Faye Wong, 770/488-5037)