J Health Behav Med Hist 2026-12.
Turn the Marketing Mix Around
Robert C. van de Graaf, Performance Medicine Specialist, Director
MEDTCC Institute for Health, Behaviour, Medicine and its History, and Perform Health Clinic ,The Netherlands
The coalition agreement in The Netherlands is in place.
They are getting to work.
Building a better Netherlands.
The minimum age for nicotine-containing products will increase.
Stocking illegal vapes will become a criminal offense and enforcement will be intensified.
Rules around marketing to children will be tightened.
These are not isolated measures.
Not a sum of separate policies.
It is one coherent whole.
Not born from moral outrage.
Not from a sudden surge of political courage.
But from years of observing one simple truth:
behavior can be steered—if you know which levers to turn.
The junk food and nicotine industries no longer need to prove this.
They have already run the experiment.
For more than sixty years.
On entire populations at once.
Always with the same four controls:
the four P’s of the marketing mix—
Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Turn those controls in one direction,
and consumption becomes more attractive, cheaper, more visible, and easier.
What follows is predictable.
Consumption grows.
Reliably.
Repeatably.
At scale.
No ideology.
No debate.
Just technique.
Turn those same controls in the other direction,
and the opposite happens.
Consumption becomes less tempting.
Less self-evident.
A little more difficult.
That too is predictable.
Given that logic, what behavior would you expect to follow?
The World Health Organization has never put it quite this bluntly.
It works more cautiously.
More slowly as well.
First research.
Then evidence.
Then consensus.
And only after that—after extensive lobbying—policy.
But when you line up WHO recommendations over the years,
the so-called Best Buys,
something remarkable appears.
Every proven effective measure
turns the same controls.
Again and again.
Limit promotion.
Change price incentives.
Restrict availability.
Set standards for the product.
There they are again:
the four P’s.
But now in reverse.
That is where behavior emerges.
The coalition agreement makes this concrete.
Take nicotine policy.
Not by appealing to willpower,
but by setting limits on the product,
restricting access,
raising the age threshold,
and actively removing illegal variants from the market.
Less availability.
More barriers.
Less automatic use.
Not paternalism.
Marketing logic—
in reverse.
Or look at the tightening of rules around marketing to children.
Not because parents are failing.
Not because children simply need to become more resilient.
But because constant exposure normalizes behavior.
Reduce promotion,
and the pressure declines.
The environment stops pushing.
That is not a coincidence.
That is exactly how marketing works—
this time working against consumption.
The WHO has never framed it this way.
But after years of research the conclusion is clear:
if you want to reduce consumption behavior,
you must reverse the marketing mix.
Not halfway.
Not temporarily.
But coherently and consistently.
Marketing itself teaches us this:
one lever helps.
Four levers change the system.
This does not require a debate about taste.
No moral judgment.
No appeal to individual willpower.
It requires design thinking:
which consumption behaviors do we want to reduce—
and which do we not?
The industry already gave us the answer.
The WHO has confirmed it for years.
The new coalition is now taking the next step.
The logic is in plain sight.
Turn the marketing mix around.
Not one lever.
But all four at the same time.
Translation from: Draai de marketingmix om(Arts en Auto)