Was there a positive impact from Kate's appearance on Dr. Phil's show?

Dr. Phil has an enormous audience.

He has about 5.3 rating points or a 14 share of the US television viewing
audience. Each rating point is 1,067,000 households, or 1 percent of the
US's estimated 106.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use
TVs tuned into the show. That's 5,655,100 homes. And the demographics skew
strongly to an at home, female audience.

Kate's original goal was to show that audience that someone who is a normal
mom might also be someone who is breastfeeding an older child. It was a
reasonable goal and I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams thought
that she was going to convince Dr. Phil to abandon his theories or his
format and in one episode present the situation as we would like to see it
presented.

Instead there were very legitimate concerns that it would be presented
badly, that Kate's situation would be misrepresented, and that the "image"
of breastfeeding would be negatively impacted because of Kate's appearance.

We talk all the time about how hard it is to counter the ubiquitous images
that we see promoting bottle-feeding and parenting practices that make
breastfeeding seem to be an extinct practice.

The hallmarks of a marketing campaign are: advertising, publicity, and
direct promotion. We are all frustrated that there are few resources put
into advertising, publicizing, and promoting breastfeeding.

Most of the people on this list do their part in the third category - direct
promotion. Work is done one-on-one, to small groups. That is necessary and
very effective work, and few campaigns succeed without this third
ingredient. Direct influence is very powerful.

That work needs to be supported by the other two in the "troika" of
marketing - advertising and publicity. When direct "sales" or "promotion" is
not supported by a consistent and persistent mass media advertising and/or
publicity campaign, efforts can be thwarted by conflicting messaging.

So Kate's appearance was a small but important effort to shift the
perception that people have of breastfeeding through the use of one of those
tools - publicity. It was a daring and canny move and I think it was
successful.

That's all I can write about this morning - gotta get out the door to music
classes.

Perhaps many of you think this is off topic, or not relevant, or a
frustrating diversion from your work. Think about this - for the next year,
one in 10, maybe more of the clients you see will have seen that episode.

It will have influenced them in some way.

-- Jodine

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