Bringing Social Marketing to the Heart of Health Promotion in Slovenia

Since 2002, Slovenia has implemented a nationwide, expert-led health promotion program for adults, providing preventive check-ups, counseling, and workshops to encourage healthier lifestyles. Over time, it has become a cornerstone of the country’s public health system, giving everyone access to evidence-based preventive care.

However, one ongoing challenge is reaching the working-age population before chronic diseases develop. While older adults and retirees engage readily, many in the workforce struggle to prioritize prevention amid busy work and family lives. To bridge this gap, the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) launched a one-day social marketing training module in 2018 for health promotion centers’ teams. Each year, around 50 professionals learn how to more effectively motivate individuals to adopt healthier lifestyles by connecting with what truly matters to them.

This September, those ideas came to life through two national conferences that placed social marketing at the center of health promotion discussions. Two dynamic conference sessions were delivered by Judita Kulovec and Silva Nemeš from the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ, Slovenia) together with John Bromley and John Landels from the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC, UK).

The first of the two sessions, held at the Together for Health conference, was titled “What Kind of ‘Together for Health’ Ambassador Am I?” and invited participants to reflect on their own roles as advocates for healthy choices and healthier living. Rather than focusing on more information or persuasion, the discussions centered on empathy, insight, and co-creation—key social marketing tools that can transform interactions between health professionals and the public.

A few days later, at public health national conference, the session “Using Social Marketing to Encourage Responsiveness to Public Health Interventions in Health Promotion,” explored how social marketing thinking can help health professionals—including physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, dietitians and others— better understand and respond to the real motivations and barriers people face when making lifestyle changes. Participants discussed practical ways to make preventive programs more relevant and engaging—especially for working-age adults who not only often feel “too healthy” to need preventive care, but also face multiple competing demands from work, family, and other responsibilities that make it difficult to act proactively when it comes to their health.

Both sessions drew strong interest and lively debate, reflecting a growing recognition in Slovenia that effective prevention depends as much on understanding people as on understanding health. The collaboration between NSMC and NIJZ continues to build a bridge between public health expertise and the behavioral insight needed to inspire real, lasting change.