AppId is over the quota
Now the company is embarking on a two-tiered marketing campaign, one directed at recruiting doctors to incorporate the program into their practices, and another at consumers.
“In medical school, I learned more about treating malaria than I learned about treating obesity,” begins a print ad directed at physicians that quotes Dr. Michael Kaplan, the founder of the company. “I have yet to see a patient with malaria.”
The ad will begin appearing in February in medical publications including the American Journal of Medicine. The campaign is by the Levinson Tractenberg Group, an independent agency in Manhattan.
“Jenny Craig didn’t go to medical school,” begins another ad, referring to the weight-loss brand that recently began going by “Jenny.” “Learn how to easily integrate our nonsurgical, scientifically proven, evidence-based programs into your practice.”
An ad directed at consumers, meanwhile, features an illustration of an obese version of the Statue of Liberty, her torch replaced by an ice cream cone stacked with six scoops. “The government has finally agreed to trim the fat,” reads the headline.
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Popular weight loss companies tend to hire celebrity endorsers, with Weight Watchers currently featuring Jennifer Hudson and Charles Barkley, Jenny featuring Mariah Carey, and Nutrisystem featuring Janet Jackson. But Joel Levinson, a partner in the Levinson Tractenberg Group, dismisses the approach.
“That’s a me-too weight-loss product approach, and that’s a killer for me,” Mr. Levinson said of celebrity endorsements. The center’s campaign stresses the “unique selling point” of the program being administered by physicians, he said.
“Weight loss with a degree of difference,” begins another ad. “A medical degree.” While “most of the other diet programs will say ‘consult a physician,’?” said Mr. Levinson, “here, we are the physicians.”
The American rate of obesity, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or greater (about 203 pounds for a 5-foot-9 adult), grew from 13.4 percent of the population in 1962 to 34.3 percent in 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In announcing that it would cover obesity treatment, Medicare cited not just public-health concerns but economic ones, since treating obesity may be cheaper than treating diseases for which the overweight are predisposed, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some cancers.
As an internist practicing on Long Island in 2002, Dr. Kaplan, the company founder, said he grew tired of “handing out prescriptions all day for hypertension and other conditions that were related to obesity,” and decided to open a practice specializing in weight loss.
He had grown to three Long Island offices in 2006 when he decided to market his approach, and now the company trains and licenses more than 450 physicians in 46 states, with such licenses representing anything from a subspecialty within a general practitioner’s office to a full-fledged weight-loss center.
Patients begin with an initial consultation where factors including body mass and overall body fat are discussed, and where patients are presented with up to three diet options, with the quickest weight-loss approach requiring the most motivation and costing the most.
Like typical weight-loss programs, Dr. Kaplan recommends exercise regimens and supplies meal-replacement shakes, bars and vitamins. But physicians, unlike nonmedical weight-loss plans, may recommend diets as low as 800 calories a day, and prescribe appetite suppressants, which Dr. Kaplan said he did with as many as 20 percent of patients, often only in the first few weeks.
“I’ve been saying since Day 1 that obesity is a disease” and best treated by doctors, said Dr. Kaplan, who predicted that most insurers would follow Medicare and cover obesity treatment within a year.
A survey by Mintel, the market research firm, indicated that among dieters, men are more likely than women to be dieting to address a health concern like high blood pressure (40 percent men, 33 percent women), diabetes (31 percent men, 24 percent women) and heart disease (29 percent men, 23 percent women).
While men make up about 10 percent of clients at Weight Watchers, they represent about one-third of patients for Dr. Kaplan’s company.
“Men are less concerned that they’re gaining weight until there are medical conditions presented to them by a physician,” said Kevin Eberly, chief executive of the Center for Medical Weight Loss.
Special K, the cereal from Kellogg, directs its advertising and marketing squarely at women, whom it encourages to take the Special K Challenge, a diet that substitutes two meals a day with the brand’s cereal, shakes and bars.
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For almost a decade, the brand has promoted the diet as enabling losing up to six pounds in two weeks, but is now taking a different approach.
In a new commercial, women in Times Square reluctantly agree to get on scales in public, then are pleasantly surprised when, instead of numbers, the scales display words including satisfaction, pizazz, confidence and moxie.
The commercial, part of campaign by the Chicago office of Leo Burnett, part of the Publicis Groupe, will be introduced on Jan. 2, high season for weight-loss companies.
“We’re trying to change the conversation from one that’s always focused about deprivation to one that’s focused on motivation,” said Doug VanDeVelde, senior vice president for cereal marketing at Kellogg.
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