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Ideas in Action
Wharton
Alumnus and
Professor Team
to Challenge
Undergraduate
Class to Combat
Teen Obesity
Samuel Botts, WG’02, had
long wanted a business that
provided him an outlet to
give back to the community,
but he was frustrated that
he thought he had found a
good program and the community
wasn’t responding
the way he had hoped.
After getting his MBA
from Wharton, Botts opened
a gym and health club,
Vigorworks, in Center City
Philadelphia. He often consulted
his parents in Maryland
about his business and one
day he and his mother started
talking about the epidemic of
adolescent obesity.
“I was in a business where
I thought I could do something
about that,” said Botts.
He said one of the best experiences
he had had at
Wharton was being in the
Milken Young Entrepreneur
program, where he mentored
kids, especially those
otherwise underprivileged,
so he knew he had options
to work with the community
around him. He found out
that AmeriChoice, the health
maintenance organization,
had a program which integrated
weight loss with ongoing
nutrition and exercise
behavior modification. Botts
wanted to particularly target
underprivileged kids, the
group most especially vulnerable
to adolescent obesity.
He went through two cycles
of the 12-week course,
but he found it both difficult
to recruit kids and to
keep them in the program.
“He couldn’t figure out
why the attrition rate was so
high,” said Americus Reed
II, the Wharton Associate
Professor of Marketing who
Botts calls “my mentor.”
Reed suggested an initiative
from the Fels Institute
of Government in which the
institute would sponsor a
classroom solution to business
problems, particularly
if they would all partner
with a government agency.
Botts had met Dr. Calvin B.
Johnson, the Pennsylvania
Secretary of Health.
“He was very much into
the program because of his
interest in lessening teen obesity,”
said Botts. AmeriChoice
was certainly on board, too.
“If we do things like this,
people would get sick less.
Insurance companies and
states would save money.
Type II diabetes was never
in kids’ populations until recently.
Other illnesses — hypertension,
even heart disease — they can all be prevented
with adherence to a healthy
lifestyle and this program
would be good for that.”
So Reed made attracting
underprivileged children to
the AmeriChoice/Vigorworks
program a centerpiece of
his Marketing 211 course,
“Consumer Behavior.”
AmeriChoice had 3,000 prospective
clients, most through
Medicaid, who would qualify
to go to Vigorworks for
the 12-week program. Reed
split his class into six-student
groups, each assigned to come
up with a flyer and a standard
phone/text message to attract
young people and their families
to the program.
The result was a winwin-win for all concerned — Botts, AmeriChoice, and
the students in Reed’s class.
“One of the big reasons
I came to Wharton was experiential
learning,” said Howard Singer, W’08. “It’s
a nice thing to spend a semester
with concepts, but
then you take a final exam
and that’s all there is. We
saw actual live change with
what we did.”
Singer’s group, for instance,
did the bulk of
its research on marketing
health-related messages.
The students found out that
lighter backgrounds encouraged
people to accept those
health-related messages.
“Then we found that
people’s eyes move across a
page in certain ways, moving
from the middle outward
and then left to right,”
he said, so they built their
flyer around those ideas.
Alex Tryon’s group
found in research that
teenagers need a lot of visual
stimulation, and a
connection to a positive
past experience, to be attracted
to a mailing.
“We discovered blue was
particularly good, because it
was a color with high stimulation.
If a kid saw it, he got
his attention. Orange was
another high-energy color,”
said Tryon, C’08. David
Berger, W’07, said his group
found that Botts’s original
mailings were filled with too
much information.
“Even an audience interested
in reading wouldn’t be
interested in something that
cluttered,” said Berger. “We
ended up with a really clean
flyer. The front had a tag
line, a silhouette of an athlete,
and a symbol.”
All of them worked, according
to Botts and Reed.
Botts’s first group had only included
10 teens, and the second
12-week course had 30
people sign up but six dropped
out. The third time, with the
student flyers, 43 teenagers
signed up for the program and
only two dropped out partway
through.
“We didn’t say it was
fat camp. We worded it
to the parents to say, ‘if
your child is at risk,’” said Samantha Flowers, W’09.
“It is great to see the results
of a real product.”
Berger, who planned to
go to work for the businessclass-only airline, Eos, after
graduation said he was
grateful for the “real world”
project right before his first
full-time job.
“College in general should
be more like this,” he said.
“In most classes, you would
have to take for granted that
what Professor Reed said was
right. Here you could see
whether using or ignoring
his advice really worked. It
was a class, for once, that actually
had consequences.” |
