For men, there is increasing recognition that middle age (45-70) is significantly underrepresented in health promotion policies designed to improve their health and wellbeing. Middle age or midlife is a pivotal period in one’s life course in terms of finding a new or renewed purpose in life, addressing the excesses of youth, reducing work and home stress, and setting up behavioural patterns that influence positive and healthy aging. From a men’s health perspective, a more nuanced social marketing approach is needed to influence men to be more proactive regarding their health behaviours. Moreover, With the rapid development of digital health today, the lack of ehealth or digital health literacy in men is an urgent problem to address to help foster health and wellbeing.

In recent years marketing has taken a “cultural turn” toward promoting locally produced crafts, art, music, clothing, active engagement in cultural events and other one-of-a-kind experiences as part of a worldwide rise of the cultural economy. These activities typically emerge in communities where clusters of creative people live, work and engage in producing a lively cultural scene of mutual support and learning. All to often when these communities are discovered by large-scale commercial interests they soon begin to decline as attention shifts from the production of cultural experiences and artifacts to their consumption, with shops replacing artists’ neighborhoods, imported mass produced simulations replacing genuine products, chain shops filling spaces with unrelated products, and the conviviality of the community is lost to overt commercialization. In this way, marketing ends up “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs” as the district’s creative scene becomes one of countlessly contrived and repetitive “geographies of nowhere”. This presentation focuses on the ways in which filmmaking can be used in support of a responsible approach to marketing by focusing on the people of creative communities rather than simply their products as commodities to be marketed. Marketing and markets can thrive by contributing to authentic place-making, rather than simply place-marketing, through compelling stories of the importance of the people and their communities in the products or experiences being marketed. The emphasis here is on creative communities that are not just sites of consumption, but are living communities that create unique events, experiences and artifacts. By helping to contribute to the understanding of the vitality and social worth of these communities, marketing can more responsibly reflect the values and importance sustaining their way of life. Markets then become more sustainable as well. The presentation will give examples of approaches to filmmaking for responsible marketing. Character driven, place-based stories that are uplifting without being promotional on naive, with people speaking in their own voices are some of the key elements. Examples of possible places for responsible marketing in Asia will be given to anchor the conversation in the real world.