Social marketing: a commercial marketing strategy for understanding and improving health

Disease prevention and health promotion is now looking forward to newer innovative platforms to bring social change. Social marketing is a process that applies marketing principles and techniques to create, communicate, and deliver value in order to influence target audience behaviours that benefit society (public health, safety, the environment and communities) as well as the target audience. There are many challenges of marketing approach in India like financial cost, non-availability of audience data, difficulty in measuring marketing efforts, negative demand benefit to third party etc. These challenges can be dealt with 8 benchmark of social marketing which includes exchange, self-interest, behaviour change, competition, audience segmentation, consumer orientation, formative research and marketing mix (4 ‘P’s). Currently in India, condoms are social marketed under NACP-IV which can be extended to OCPs, Injectable contraceptives, ORS, Mosquito nets etc. For success of social marketing incorporation of consumers as partners into the planning process is must along with training of health professionals to enable them to imbue public health organizations with a marketing mind-set. Grantees should be given sufficient time and resources to conduct formative research, develop evidence-based marketing strategies, pretest program interventions, and monitor program activities

Effect of computerized biofeedback relaxation on stress related physiological parameters

Background: Mental health diseases such as insomnia, anxiety, stress and depression all have a close relationship with the autonomic nervous system. The physiological parameters of autonomic activity viz. galvanic skin resistance, electromyography, respiration and pulse rate can be regulated with the help of computerized biofeedback relaxation training. The main objective of this study was to see the effect of computerized biofeedback relaxation training on psychophysiological parameters of autonomic activity.Methods: In the present study 40 high stress post graduate students were selected. All participants were randomly divided into two group i.e. computerized biofeedback relaxation training (group-1) and placebo group (group-2). Forehead muscle tension, respiration rate, pulse rate and galvanic skin resistance were assessed, and inventories measuring stress were administered pre-randomization. Descriptive, Paired sample ‘t’ test, F-test and Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze the data with the help of SPSS 16 version.Results: Biofeedback group reported a significant change in muscle tension (p=0.27), respiration rate (p=0.01) and galvanic skin response (p=0.35) after relaxation but at the same time control group reported moderate increase in muscle tension. Additionally, the computerized biofeedback group was able to maintain the stress level while the control group had a significant increase in the stress level over the 10 days of relaxation training.Conclusions: Biofeedback relaxation useful alternative therapy for management of stress and emotional disturbance in graduate students. During a stressful period this may also be helpful to promote overall psychological health.