Male behaviour change: Masculinities, participation and social systems

Australian males across a broad range of cohorts are highly resistant to health and social marketing messages and, perhaps relatedly, overrepresented across an array of health problems and social issues. Yet conventional social marketing campaigns targeted at men are often poorly conceived and executed, either mischaracterising or misunderstanding identified characteristics of men’s health, knowledge and information seeking behaviours. Male target groups are especially unresponsive, even actively resistant, to social marketing messages they feel threaten their autonomy, question their capacity or diminish their competence, radically inhibiting the possibility of broad attitudinal and behaviour change. To address this stubborn problem, we propose that social marketing campaigns must innovatively combine more nuanced presentations of gender – presenting masculinity as plural and changeable – increased target group participation throughout, and a multi-layered social systems engagement approach to support meaningful attitude and sustained behaviour change.