Heart Healthy Cooking: NHLBI Helps Put Simple and Delicious Recipes On the Table

Background:

The American Institutes for Research (AIR) manages the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Health Information Center and clearinghouse for all of their educational materials.  Part of the mission of the NHLBI is to develop educational campaigns and materials to promote the prevention of heart, lung, and blood diseases.  Heart healthy eating falls under the purview of the NHLBI and AIR wanted to develop a heart healthy eating product line.  Cookbooks have always been a popular item in the NHLBI product portfolio as well as among the general population.

Program background:

AIR approached the NHLBI about developing a new Keep the Beat™ brand and healthy eating product line after a decade of successfully publishing other cookbooks.  The goal was to promote good health and motivate people to cook healthy meals at home by developing a line of bookstore-worthy products that brings panache to a government publication on healthy eating. The recipes should be delicious, heart healthy, relatively simple and quick to prepare, accessible to all Americans. 

In October 2009, the NHLBI published Keep the Beat™ Recipes: Deliciously Healthy Dinners – the first in a series of cookbooks.  Prior to the launch, AIR began planning promotional strategies and tactics to encourage healthy eating among the general public and distribute the cookbook through the NHLBI Health Information Center.  To break through the clutter of health messages, the strategies and tactics included a mix of traditional marketing, internet and social media marketing, and innovative “campaign-style” outreach, including: 

• Promotional activities at conferences, such as the American Dietetic Association
• Launch event for public and media at the New York City Union Square Greenmarket
• Partnership development with organizations supporting healthy eating, such as supermarkets, food service vendors, and worksites
• Development of a dynamic Keep the Beat™: Deliciously Healthy Eating Web site with videos (http://hin.nhlbi.nih.gov/healthyeating)
• Link-building, search engine optimization, email marketing, and other social media networking tools

Evaluation Methods and Results: 

Success was measured by a variety of data points:

• Distribution: almost 40,000 cookbooks in 5 months primarily through the NHLBI Health Information Center. 
• Web site: top 10 pages received 106,273 visits.
• Launch Event Activities –  500 cookbooks distributed, over 2000 recipe samples provided, 1500 raffle entries
• Supporting Organizations: successful relationships formed with supermarket chains, a national food service vendor, and worksites to promote the recipe book to thousands of constituents.
• Awards: Both the Keep the Beat™ cookbook and Web site won a 2009 Mercury Award for professional communications. 

Conclusions:

An overarching lesson learned from this effort is that a campaign-style approach to product marketing can be implemented for carefully selected items from the NHLBI and that a cookbook can be successful when promoted and distributed by a government agency. 

Implications for Research and/or Practice:  

AIR will use these successes and lessons learned as well as add new ideas to develop a promotion plan for the next cookbook, Keep the Beat™ Recipes: Deliciously Healthy Families Meals slated to launch in October 2010.