OBESITY STATISTICS

Shawna: Thanks for your comments. FYI, my SWOT platform on Behavior Mod. In the Obese population is probably not the direction that our team is headed. I knew I was taking a chance in getting off track a bit, but I was trying out a new idea for the financial end of our project. I think your ideas are probably much more along the lines of what Jared and Bob are headed.

Hopefully the purpose of this assignment was to help each of us to get "real" and to find the specifics in our marketing plan and how to pay for it. I explored the possibility of getting govt. support and that means tackling the medical costs of Obesity because that is where govt. and private business are heavily vested.. Jared and you are exploring the advertising side of financing this project and that may solve all of our financial needs for an Obesity reduction program. Two different business plans alltogether! And as you have read in my specifics, my finances are almost unreal and unattainable, but my exercise was valid for me!!

On another note: For all the statistic freaks in our group, here are some facts about Obesity in Hawaii. Our current statewide population is estimated to be around 1,340,674 persons statewide (2010 census results not out). This is based on a 6.8% growth rate per year or approximately 91,166 new persons every year. If this is true, then the counties are divided into rough round numbers like this: Honolulu-1,000,000 Hawaii-150,000 Kauai 60,000 Maui 140,000. With a 17.8% Obese population (defined by having BMI 30% -Body Mass Index or greater) then the total population in Hawaii which defines our Obese market is 238,640 persons with a growth rate (using the 6.8% figure) of 16,227 new customers per year.

However, if you divide that up by county, you begin to see that our outer island dollars disappear for services quickly. Honolulu accounts for 178,000 persons in our target market whereas Kauai accounts for only 10,680 persons. 10,000 clients is a valuable goal, but it will take the same number of marketing dollars to run a program on Kauai as it will on Oahu.

Need is another matter. Rural outer islands have less access to programs, gyms, healthy foods, food and nutrition coaches, preventative medicine physicians, exercise coaches, places to exercise than people who live on Oahu.

I would be interested to find out if the rate of Obesity were higher on the outer islands than on Oahu??
My gawd...our Borders just closed here on Kauai and we have only that one bookstore, so pretty soon we won't even have access to fitness books and DVDs. Yikes.

Now, my next quest is to find out how many people are just overweight (more than 25% BMI) in Hawaii and also to look at the ages of the overweight and obese populations. I'm trying to figure out how many users we need to have a successful user rate.
For example if children under 16 account for half of the above numbers??? Then our target is much smaller than we think. If 1/3 of them are over 65 years, then our target "active market" is even smaller yet.

Ok, more later. Sorry to overwhelm everyone today, but I'm on a roll. Tomorrow and Sunday I am virtually unavailable except for the small window at 11:00 on Sunday. The rest of the day is booked. In fact, if our time changes much for our conference, right or left, I probably can't participate on SKYPE on Sunday.