These are messages Albertans will see and hear over the coming months, and years, as part of the Cancer Prevention Program’s new five-year social marketing campaign, Stand Up For Your Life.

The goal of Stand Up For Your Life is to transform living healthy from a ‘should do’ way of thinking to an ‘Albertan thing to do.’ Kicking-off the campaign are ‘made-in-Alberta’ billboard and radio ads across the province, complemented with a social networking website to let Albertans connect and share stories with fellow Albertans, and find tips for living in a healthier way.

Why Stand Up For Your Life?

In 2007, the Cancer Prevention Program surveyed 2,500 Albertans to find out about their underlying beliefs, attitudes and practices as related to cancer prevention.

Results found Albertans value and want to make healthy behaviour changes in their lives, but these desires are not translating into action. Albertans' awareness, knowledge and belief that healthy behaviours contribute to cancer prevention was very limited.

These findings ignited the development of the Stand Up For Your Life social marketing campaign to translate Albertans values and desires towards living healthy into action. 

What is the Stand Up For Your Life campaign all about?

The Stand Up For Your Life campaign is all about living in a healthy,  fun , non-prescribed, Albertan way. The campaign is a conduit to support Albertan’s choices for living healthy that may lead to chronic disease prevention behaviours, not just cancer prevention. 

The Stand Up For Your Life campaign wants to re-position living healthy to emphasize the short-term benefits of behaviour change – improved energy, feeling good, and setting an example for their children – the ‘here and now’ motivators for lifestyle change.

As such, the strategy behind the campaign is to motivate Albertans to own a unique cancer-prevention experience that is cost-free, part of every day life, fun and enjoyable.

A campaign for all Albertans

The initial phase of Stand Up For Your Life will target those most accessible and receptive to changing their behaviours as they are a key audience to attaining the ACB’s 2025 goals of reducing cancer incidence. This audience is the ‘intenders’; college-educated, 35-45 year old Albertans. Why?

• 35–45 years old recognize their own mortality and the aging process. They are key influencers of others, both older and younger.
• College-educated: In 2007, the Cancer Prevention Program enlisted the services of Environics to conduct a survey among Albertans. The survey found that college-educated individuals value and are interested in living healthy but have yet to translate this into behaviour/action, thus they are a key audience that can be moved towards living healthy (Environics, 2008a).
• Skewed male:  Focus group discussions (Environics, 2008b) revealed that while women often feel ‘maxed out’ in their day-to-day lives, men feel they have capacity to live healthier provided the efforts undertaken are fun and can include family and friends.
• “Intenders”: Intenders are those contemplating living healthy and are ready to move towards incorporating into their lives (Prochaska & Diclemente, 1983).

By targeting this group, we lay the groundwork for successfully affecting those most at risk over the long-term life of the campaign. This “beach head approach” starts by targeting the most receptive target audience to eventually reach other long-term audiences. Once influential members of society have bought-in and normalized ‘living healthy’ behaviours, the resulting social transformation, or paradigm shift, will impact other audiences and ultimately increase the persuadability of targets most-in-need (Gladwell, 2000).

Stand Up For Your Life will tap into Albertans’ strong shared sense of provincial identity and making living healthy a point of pride in communities throughout the province and in each Albertan’s way of life. 

 To find out more information about the start of an Albertan living healthy movement, visit www.standupforyourlife.ca to see our billboard ads, listen to our radio spots or to talk with other Albertans on our social networking website.

References:

Environics. (2008a). The Alberta Cancer Board: Prevention Research. Ottawa, ON: Environics Research Group.

Environics. (2008b). Alberta Cancer Board Prevention Strategic Options Focus Groups. Ottawa, ON: Environics Research Group.

Gladwell, M. (2000). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 390-395.