Health and Fitness in The Workplace

 

According to these statements, marketing is something that happens after the planning and development of the wellness program is done. It suggests that marketing is advertising, promotion, and selling. Marketing includes these components, but a problem arises in limiting definitions of marketing to them ( Bonaguro and Miaoulis 1983).

Do employees need worksite wellness programs? "Of course, they do," we answer hastily and point to lifestyle data and morbidity and mortality statistics to support our retort. Do they know or think that they need wellness programs? If the response is anything less than strongly positive, we run the risk of putting ourselves in a position of marketing "what nobody wants and what nobody needs."

There is a difference between the health professional's definition of need and the perception of the employee who is the consumer of worksite wellness programs. This distinction must be made clearly in order for programs to be dynamic and viable. The basis for marketing worksite wellness programs is identifying and understanding the employees' definitions of need and using this understanding to plan, develop, and implement programs. This does not connote a dictatorship by the employee. Rather a matching process takes place between wellness program management with its resources and point of view.

 

When the matching process is successful, the management and the employee enter into an exchange. The employee may contribute participation, enthusiasm, dollars, and lifestyle change; all are of value to the management. Management may contribute fun, opportunity to socialize, hope, promise of health or longevity, self-esteem, and a new vigor; all are of value to the employee. Ideally, both the employee and management emerge from the exchange satisfied. This is the essence of the marketing concept ( Flexner and Berkowitz 1979; Kotler 1982).

A more formal definition of marketing is "the analysis, planning, implementation and control of carefully formulated programs designed to bring about voluntary exchanges of values with target markets for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives" ( Kotler 1982).

The marketing perspective is ultimately useful because it reminds the organization of the primary purpose for which it is set up and asks for form to follow function rather than the reverse" ( Kotler 1982). Thus, following a marketing perspective, hospitals become more patient oriented than physician oriented. Universities become more oriented to students than to faculty. Wellness programs become oriented to the needs and hopes of potential participants than to the definitions of health professionals. Once again, the marketing perspective calls for a balance between organizational mission and resources on the one hand and consumer needs, values, and dreams on the other.

The implementation of the marketing perspective in wellness programs is not necessarily complex. It requires an openness to doing things differently based on consumer expressions of needs and values. This may mean putting aside the familiar health promotion program model that begins with a health risk or health hazard appraisal ( Fleming and Flexner 1983).

The following case study provides an example of the utility and the effect of applying the marketing perspective to the planning, development, and implementation of a worksite wellness program.