Being Healthy Is A Stupid Idea

An editorial by writer & marketing “extraordinaire” Eric Kiker (Halo Lasso) about messaging

Prelude by Ellen About the Author

I first met Eric Kiker almost 20 years ago while helping a friend out who owned an ad agency and needed some strategy help for a real estate client. From the moment I met Kiker (as I’ve always referred to him), I was blown away by his talent. He has a way with words that I customarily have with numbers. At the time we met he had created a proprieatry brand archetyping approach that started with an almost scientific method but yielded words and messaging only a talented artist could craft. His sweet spot has always been consumer centric brands, particularly in food, along with retail and a variety of other industries. When we would reconnect periodically or I would see his LinkedIn updates I would be wowed by his work with brands including Jenny Craig, Naked Juice and Perfect Bar (just to name a few). And his heartfelt most recent endeavor (in addition to his firm Halo Lasso) with his wife Linda - Halo Kiddo - using simple messages like “You make me so proud of me” on onesies and kids clothing to create an instant, self-compassionate, loving moment for parents and their children.

Never in a million years could I have guessed we would get to collaborate in my world of healthcare two decades later. It took that long for the growing consensus that the food and healthcare industries are inextricably linked. And for both of us to be at a point in our own separate journeys to recognize that we needed to be part of creating a future system where they work together to improve human health and reverse chronic disease.

Eric reminds

Carter Williams

and I regularly that much like in food and in healthcare, there will need to be a System C for branding, marketing and messaging in this new ecosystem. One that stops blaming, shaming, tricking, dismissing and hoodwinking consumers. To learn more about his thoughts on where we miss the mark check out this video we recorded together earlier this year.

Without further ado here is Eric’s first piece for System C…

“Being healthy is a stupid idea”

I’ll bet you $5 you can’t find a single person who’d agree with that statement.

So why are so many of us not-so-healthy?

How could we spend $4.9T (That’s $4,900,000,000,000) on healthcare and still be seeing more of just about every bad health thing that can befall a human?

To answer that, just replace the “stupid:”

• Being healthy is a mind-bogglingly-confusing idea.

• Being healthy is an unbelievably-time-consuming idea.

• Being healthy is an our-budget-is-already-stretched-too-thin idea.

Which leads to:

• Being healthy is a for-someone-other-than-me idea.

As

Ellen Brown

and

Carter Williams

work the global room in service to their one sentence premise — if we had affordable nutrition and you walked into a grocery store and it was hard to make a bad decision, we could eliminate chronic disease — I’m busying myself thinking about how and to whom we take the message.

I’m a writer. I’ve spent my whole career in marketing, the majority of it as a freelancer. Client direct. Gun for hire, if you will. And for the majority of that majority of my career, I’ve been working against my one-sentence premise:

• You can deliver your brand’s message with shame or kindness. Both will work, but kindness will get better and longer-lasting results.

So I’m considering all these people who don’t believe being healthy is a stupid idea — but are yet on a scale between unhealthy and chronically, desperately unhealthy. Where I’m landing is, they’re the ones who will ultimately get us to Ellen and Carter’s System C, if and only if, we can convince them they can overcome all the tactical and emotional friction that’s currently making them say: Being healthy is an impossible idea.

Why will they be the change? Look out the window; we live in a Capitalistic society. And the only reason the vast majority of brands ever change what they’re doing to make money is, if the people stop buying their products.

If regular folks decide to curtail their Crunch Wrap Supreme consumption in favor of more fruits and vegetables (and other healthier things), the food system will happily, profitably change.

So, if we’re going to get these regular folks inside the tent, we have to let them off the hook. We need to start by saying, yep, getting healthy, especially by eating healthier, more nutritious food is no picnic (unless you’re eating healthier food at a picnic). But it’s not your fault…

…that you work crazy hours

…that more nutritious food is way more expensive, especially for a family

…that most of us neither grew up with cooking nor developed the muscle memory to do it easily (or joyfully)

…that eating for comfort is a perfectly natural, normal and okay thing to do

…that bad food tastes SO. DAMN. GOOD.

That last one is based on a Brand Position I wrote a couple years ago for a much-healthier-than-Nutella brand of coconut-and-chocolate-based spread:

• How will we ever eat healthier when bad food tastes too good?

Why will this letting-them-off-the-hook approach work? I used the word before: shame. You can insert “guilt” if you like. The two are different but it’s okay for now.

I know we don’t, in general, love talking about mental health — or the idea that we’re not 100% in control of our thoughts, fears, worries and whatnot. So I’ll just say this: we give ourselves more crap than anyone else. Marketers know this, which is why they so often lead with messages that offer a hopeful solution, only after making their audience feel even worse about their problem (ever seen the ad in which two buddies openly berate the third about how tubby his t-shirt makes him look?).

For decades, we’ve told people they should eat healthier food. We’ve created The Food Pyramid and MyPlate. We’ve used dire warnings about chronic disease. We’ve threatened to tax “sinful” foods. And what does our population do? They put Bugles on the tips of their fingers and hold up the middle one. Why? We don’t like being told what to do.

For way too long, every well-meaning attempt to get people to eat more nutritious food has made those people the enemy. My question is, what if we gave those people the support and understanding they need to be the hero of their own stories?

From where I sit, that’s how we make this stand.

About the Author - Meet Eric Kiker

I call my company Halo Lasso. It’s because, after all these years of writing copy for some pretty recognizable brands: Naked Juice, Perfect Bar, Atkins, Jenny Craig and The Paleo Diet, as well as a number of engagements with the monoliths such as Procter & Gamble and Church and Dwight, I’ve developed a philosophy:

If people feel better about themselves after reading your ad, post or email, instead of worse (that’s the “Halo”), your brand will be more successful, because those people will recognize the good treatment you give them, become customers and stick with you for a much longer time (that’s the “Lasso”).

The fact I’m a huge fan of the show, Ted Lasso is a nice coincidence. And it’s all about kindness, which I think is a very capitalistic thing to add to marketing communications.

Invitation to Guest Authors

As we gather tremendous momentum in this endeavor to bring the right people together to create a System C that will not only eliminate the chronic disease epidemic but also stop chronic disease in it’s tracks, we want to highlight the ideas of our readers. Please send us a message if you are interested with your thoughts. And to make it easier here is a little button to shoot me a note directly.