Brands are designed to build relationships between consumers and the products, services, or organizations they represent by providing added value to their objects. Through brand promotion, consumers form associations with brands, which can become established and lead to a long-term relationship between the product, service or organization and consumer. Similarly, public health brands are the associations that individuals hold for health behaviours or lifestyles. Public health branding - building positive associations with healthy behaviours and lifestyle choices - is the primary strategy by which commercial marketing is applied in health communication and social marketing.
This book examines theory and best practices of branding and its application in public health programs. Through a series of reviews and case studies, the book argues that branding is an emerging public health strategy that needs resources and continued development of innovative methodologies to effect lasting population-level change. In recent years, public health branding has been successfully applied across a wide range of chronic and infectious disease issues and behaviors - from tobacco control to HIV/AIDS - and globally across the developed and developing world. Branding is an important strategy for public health because it can address multiple behaviours simultaneously, and most health risks stem from multiple behaviours and complex lifestyle choices. Promoting healthy lifestyles is the key outcome for public health, thus making the development of improved branding strategies a critical objective for the field.

Like all aspects of society, public health practice has been fundamentally changed by the emergence of electronic and social media as centerpieces of human communication and connection. More than ever, public health practitioners rely on these new marketing and communications technologies to promote longstanding goals like disease prevention and fostering social responsibility. Social Marketing Research for Global Public Health offers proven guidelines for crafting campaigns that work in public health. It equips readers with tools pioneered by corporate marketers to increase the efficacy of public health interventions in any setting. It also provides practical advice to practitioners seeking to assess their interventions, along with examples for effective outreach to promote smoking cessation, financial literacy, and other social goods. Combining overviews of marketing theory and methodology with practical chapters specific to public health, Social Marketing Research for Global Public Health provides a crucial and holistic understanding for this new imperative in the field.

This book explores the psychological factors underlying brand choices we make. How we encounter brands (and how often we), think about them, feel about them, and how we experience them in relation to competing brands, has a big effect on which ones we choose, and keep on choosing. At the same time, presumably there are neural events occurring when we encounter and mentally respond to brands. These represent ways in which we can explain and understand why people choose and remain loyal to brands. These explanations of branding are related and intuitive. But how does the psychology of branding work? This book offers answers to that question. Brands are all around us and in a sense represent any person, place, or thing to which people attach associations anything that represents something for someone. This insight has led those trying to improve society, not just to sell products, services, and organisational reputations, but to take up the mantle of branding. The branding of social and health behaviours has become widespread and is now a central approach in social marketing the use of marketing to benefit society rather than the marketer. In an earlier volume, my co-editor Gerard Hastings and I noted "that by learning about concepts such as brand development, identity and equity, we can do for public health what Philip Morris had done for teen smoking." This is exactly what's been happening for some 20 years, and now branding represents a powerful strategy to change social and health behaviours for the better. Branding is now truly a systemic approach to modifying human behaviour for commercial as well as socially beneficial purposes.