The loveLife campaign is South Africa’s national HIV prevention program for youth. The non-profit has an annual budget of approximately 200 million rand (US$ 26.6M) and is funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the South African government and the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, as well as a range of corporate partnerships. Started in 1999, loveLife began life as an education program but is now referred to as a brand, and applies branding techniques to fight HIV/AIDS.

The target market of the loveLife brand is young people under the age of eighteen. Research shows that about 50 percent of HIV infections in South Africa are transmitted to people before the age of 20 (in a country where 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen).

AIDS is already a pandemic in South Africa, where more than 5 million of the 43 million residents test positive for HIV. Studies project that unless something is done, by the year 2010, 10 million South Africans will have the disease, and the country’s GDP could be reduced by 17 percent as a result. Reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote in the New York Times, “If anything can stop the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, it will have to be the teenagers” (February 3, 2002). If loveLife fails to reach the youth of South Africa, the country’s entire future may be in jeopardy.

Angela Stewart-Buchanan, loveLife’s Head of Communications, says that branding is a big part of loveLife’s strategy for success. “The concept of adopting commercial branding techniques for the purposes of public health/HIV education arose from extensive research among young South Africans providing high level evidence of significant brand awareness.” Young people in South Africa, she noted, are responding to the “aspirational attributes of youth-oriented global brands such as Nike, Levi’s and Sprite.”

The Sprite campaign in South Africa, in fact, was of special interest to the pilots of loveLife. “At the time the leaders of what became loveLife were exploring how to more effectively engage with young people around the behavioral imperatives of HIV prevention,” Stewart-Buchanan notes. “Sprite was being re-launched in South Africa through a combination of high penetration media and community level outreach.” She points out that “the key aspect of this approach that has most carry-over for loveLife is the positioning of popular brands as ‘lifestyle’ brands.”

Sprite’s worldwide strategy to save its flagging brand in the mid-1990s was to infiltrate youth culture by sponsoring concerts, and sending attractive cool kids into dorms and Internet chat rooms to hand out and talk up Sprite, exploiting the “cool effect” by focusing a core number of “opinion leaders” to influence a larger group of peers.

By infiltrating the lifestyle of these trendsetters, Sprite rejuvenated its brand. A strategy loveLife hoped to use for changing more complex lifestyles of sexual behavior.

LoveLife integrates communications with interaction to promote its brand. First, loveLife runs an innovative nationwide media campaign, which includes TV and a series of high profile, eye-catching ads placed on billboards and taxis aimed at promoting safe sex. The media campaign is coupled with a service and support program for youth, which includes a network of youth centers called “Y-Centers” where kids can show up and play basketball or volleyball and dance but they also have to participate in a sexual health/lifestyle curriculum, personal fitness and motivational training modules. These are staffed by twenty-something “groundBREAKERS,” who, like the trendsetting kids that helped revitalize Sprite, act as guides and behavior models. They are cheerful and enthusiastic about loveLife’s message (a three-tiered proposition: informed choice, shared responsibility and positive sexuality).

Most South Africans have become familiar with the messages that loveLife has put on billboards, which, unlike previous messages about HIV, are hip and relatively upbeat. Actually, they are downright sexy -- usually showing good-looking young kids in tantalizing situations. One depicts a muscled male back with numerous female arms caressing it, below it reads “Everyone he’s slept with, is sleeping with you.” Another shows an attractive young couple in bed, with the tag: “No Pressure.”

A billboard campaign, launched in August 2003, is even more overtly brand-inspired. These billboards show simulacrums of famous brand logos, such as a Levi’s logo altered to read “Love: 100% Pure -- Made to Last.” Another clearly refers to a Calvin Klein aftershave, but the bottle reads “Dignity -- Wear With Pride,” while a third example shows a luscious box of Cadbury’s chocolates, the wording changed to “Respect -- The Gift of Love.” This billboard program combines what loveLife refers to as “the techniques of commercial advertising and public health to capture and sustain the attention of young people.” The use of an exciting glamorous campaign is an attempt to directly attack what loveLife’s literature refers to as “a high measure of AIDS fatigue among young people.” LoveLife’s bold approach is to makes abstinence cool, funky and hip.

Helen Epstein, in her article “AIDS in South Africa: The Invisible Cure” (New York Review of Books, July 17, 2003), profiles loveLife and then makes the following observation: “It seems mad to experiment to see whether teenagers living through very difficult times can be persuaded to choose a new sexual lifestyle as they might choose a new brand of shampoo.” Yet Stewart-Buchanan points out that the branding campaign has already proven its efficacy. Of those who know about loveLife, 76 percent say loveLife has made them more aware of the risks of unprotected sex and 65 percent report that the program has caused them to delay or abstain from sex.

However, as Stewart-Buchanan acknowledges, “a major challenge is to stay ‘ahead of the curve’…[T]he youth market is easily bored, and unless loveLife (or any other youth-brand) can keep ‘refreshing’ itself, it too will become passé.” According to the company’s voluminous research, the brand has attained a whopping 80 percent brand recognition in the youth market, since inception in 1999. Hopefully loveLife’s awareness will translate into overall AIDS awareness.

Ron Irwin teaches Branding and Business in Context at the University of Cape Town School of Management Studies in South Africa.