Eric E. Whitaker on "Offering Men Haircuts"

In November of 1998, we had a big problem in the community in which I worked. African-American men were living approximately 12½ years less than white men in the city of Chicago. In fact, they didn’t live long enough to collect a social security check at 65. And we had a clinic in this community that was used -- it was used by, it had a population of 70% female and very few men came there. So to get them into the community, we wanted to ask two basic questions. One, what exactly do you consider health to be? And, secondly, what would get you to come to a clinic like the one we had? What are the perceived barriers? So we needed to go through a process by which we talked to men about their concerns and figured out how to address those concerns so that they would come to our clinic.

I would like to say that I got the idea to have haircuts in our clinic myself; but, in fact, we undertook a process of focus groups to ask men what were their concerns and, in fact, asked them for solutions to how to get them into the clinic. One concern expressed was that men would be perceived as vulnerable if they came to be seen at our clinic and, in fact, we had to consider other ways in which to have men come to our clinics that had nothing to do with health, and haircuts were a good way to do that.

…the haircuts in our clinics have worked phenomenally. In fact, I think last year we gave out over a thousand haircuts that were free, and it’s proved to be a great attraction to our clinic.

…one of the things that’s true about barber shops in the African American community is that it’s a meeting place, a place where men can gather and talk about the issues that concern them. So when the idea came about from the participants in our focus groups about having a barber shop we didn’t have to defend it at all. It’s a cultural context in which African-American men participate in regularly and it was a welcome addition to our methods of attracting them into the clinic.

…social marketing is critical because it looks at the provision of health services from the viewpoint of a consumer. Typically what happens in public health is a lot of smart people get in a room, they develop an approach to a problem, they roll it out without consulting the community, and it fails. With social marketing you take into account the factors and concerns that mean something to you, the community, and thereby increase the probability of success.

… one thing that is true is that increasingly we need to pay more attention to our differences in geography, differences in racial and ethnic backgrounds, differences in religion and other culture differences. The thing that is key is that the cookie cutter approach, that is, one size fit all approaches, in my experience, don’t work, so we need to tailor programmatic activities to meet the needs of those that we are targeting and with social marketing we’ll get the result that will be most likely to succeed.

I’ve been trained professionally in public health and in medicine. I also have spent a fair amount of time in business school, and traditionally people talk about how to market products such as deodorant or soda to people. I think we in public health are in the business of marketing health to the public, and to do as good a job as those who are promoting things that create obesity or other unsafe health activities, we need to market health in the way that meets the needs of those who we’re targeting.