Executive Summary
The massive costs of health care ($1.7 trillion and counting) and the problems posed by various diseases (e.g., AIDS, obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, mental illness) are well known and documented. People worry more about their personal health care costs than losing their jobs, being a victim of a violent crime, or terrorist attacks. As a consequence, massive efforts to improve knowledge about detection, prevention, and treatment have been undertaken. In addition, there is growing realization that health communication strategies need to be tailored to specific segments. However, there is no general guide to the design of segment-focused health communication. To address this need, this article integrates previous studies that examine the effects of message tactics and individual differences on intentions to comply with health recommendations.
A meta-analysis of 60 studies, which report results in 584 different experimental conditions, indicates that the type of message communication affects intentions. The authors use two approaches to identify fruitful matches between message tactics and audience characteristics: a full and a reduced regression model. The results from the full regression model suggest that the meta-analysis supports the majority of the effects observed in the literature. Specifically, the results support the use of case information, social consequences, other-referencing, female communicators, and messages on detection behaviors to enhance health intentions. The results also suggest focusing on discouraging unhealthful behavior rather than promoting healthful behaviors and de-emphasizing source credibility. Finally, untailored framing and emotional messages are not advisable.
The results indicate that low-involvement audiences are more persuaded by moderately fearful gain frames, other-referencing, vivid messages, and strong source credibility, whereas highly involved audiences prefer base information and strong messages that are also moderately fearful, but they do not distinguish between levels of vividness, source credibility, and referencing. Younger audiences prefer social consequences over multiple exposures, whereas older audiences are more influenced by physical consequences regardless of the number of message exposures. Messages advocating detection behaviors are popular across age groups. Nonwhites seem to care more about vivid messages that emphasize the effect of health consequences on loved ones. Finally, messages that are persuasive to women are different from those that are persuasive to men. Specifically, women respond to emotional messages with social consequences for themselves or health consequences to near and dear ones, whereas men are more influenced by unemotional messages that emphasize personal physical health consequences. Taken together, these findings offer many opportunities to tailor health communications for different target audiences.
Biography
Punam Anand Keller is Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management in the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. She has a BA in Economics and an MBA from Bombay University, India. She earned her PhD from Northwestern University. Her research examines how consumers process information and interpret negative emotions, with a special interest in health messages. This research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Health Communications, among others. Her research has been supported by the National Cancer Institute, the Marketing Science Institute, and the National Endowment for Financial Education. She served as associate editor of Journal of Consumer Research and currently is on the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Marketing Research. She is a member of the Association for Consumer Research advisory committee on Transformative Consumer Research and cochaired the first Transformative Consumer Research Conference. Professor Keller is currently President of the Association for Consumer Research.
Donald R. Lehmann is George E. Warren Professor of Business in the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He has a BS in Mathematics from Union College, Schenectady, New York, and an M.S.I.A. and PhD from the Krannert School at Purdue University. His research interests include modeling individual and group choice and decision making, empirical generalizations and meta-analysis, the introduction and adoption of new products and innovations, and measuring the value of marketing assets (e.g., brands, customers). He has published in and served on several editorial boards and was founding editor of Marketing Letters. In addition to numerous journal articles, he has published several works, including Market Research and Analysis, Analysis for Marketing Planning, Product Management, Meta Analysis in Marketing, and Managing Customers as Investments. Professor Lehmann has served as executive director of the Marketing Science Institute and as president of the Association for Consumer Research.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Volume 27, Number 2, Fall 2008
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