New Perspective on Healthiness: When You Get Unhealthy, Your Spouse or Your Kids Pay For It

I’m certainly a fan of behavioral economics, behavioral finance, and especially the ideas in Richard Thaler‘s book, Nudge. After reading Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human earlier this winter, I was thinking about how to combine some of the principles of those books in tackling what is a self-inflicted crisis: obesity.

Last month, I wrote about the importance of considering neuromarketing in the discussion of obesity, but I think there’s another way to frame this discussion. More importantly, at first blush, when framing it this way, I think it could motivate some people to take better care of themselves (at a minimum, it helped to motivate me to do so). I don’t remember how I came to this idea, but I know that it combines some of the things that I’ve read in the books I mentioned above (and was why I made note of them).

The idea: a marketing campaign in which we tell people that, when they get unhealthy, their spouse or their kids will have to pay for it.

Most people don’t want to burden their spouses (or their children), so I thought that by drawing to their attention that their spouse/kids will be the ones who’ll have to take care of them (and maybe pay for the cost of their care?), it might sway people away from making those choices that negatively affect their health.

When I had a conversation with someone about this, they raised the important point that many people don’t have spouses and many people don’t have kids, so this campaign might not be as successful as I first thought. Those are very valid points, but don’t we think that many people will — eventually — have spouses? If we can agree to that we then could add “future” spouse or “future” children to the campaign. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the underlying principle of the idea. Do you think that people care that their spouses/kids will be left to take care of them?