Health Communication Theory. Группа авторов

2 Segmenting Priority Audiences Employing Individual Difference Variables to Improve Health Promotion Efforts

       Brian L. Quick, Tobias Reynolds‐Tylus, Salah H. Al‐Ghaithi, and Michael Mackert

      Promotional efforts aimed at a priority audience are an important feature of effective health communication efforts (Lee and Kotler 2020). Tailoring and directing messages to a specific audience segment based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral variables, as opposed to disseminating promotional messages to the general public, is a much more efficient and effective strategy (McKenzie and Smeltzer 2001). For this reason, during the early stages of a campaign, social marketers and health communication practitioners devote considerable resources to formative research efforts to identify the appropriate psychographics (e.g. barriers, benefits, competition) associated with the specific behavior of interest (Andreasen 1995). Traditionally, social marketers reject the notion of experts designing, implementing, and evaluating promotional efforts without an adequate understanding of the priority audience’s perceptions and self‐efficacy with respect to performing the behavior (Finnell and John 2017).

Audience segmentation has long been considered a necessary practice for the success of communication campaigns (Atkin and Salmon 2013; Donahew 1990; Grunig 1989; Trump 2016). To segment the audience, one divides the population into subpopulations with meaningful shared qualities (Slater 1995), seeking similar audience responses (Atkin and Salmon 2013). This practice is key to designing systematically tailored messages to fulfill the communication needs of the priority audience (Slater 1995), and it provides the basis for selecting channels to reach the intended audience (e.g. radio, word‐of‐mouth, etc; Moriarty et al. 2014). Identifying and understanding the idiosyncrasies of the priority audience enables social marketers and health communication practitioners the opportunity to create messages that resonate with the priority audience’s needs (Andreasen 1995; Lee 2016; Slater 1995). Specifically, tailored messages provide social marketers with benefits such as (i) disseminating messages more effectively to potential adopters, (ii) effectively meeting the needs of potential adopters, (iii) providing greater satisfaction to adopters, and subsequently (iv) increasing the likelihood of sustained adoption (Kotler and Roberto 1989). Slater (1995) suggests meticulous campaign planners rarely overlook careful targeting and audience segmentation strategies, noting that it is important to adapt the style and content of our promotional messages to adequately fit the needs of the priority audience. By carefully tailoring a message to a particular audience segment, Andreasen (1995) suggests campaigners can more effectively meet the priority audience’s needs, thus resulting in desired outcomes. In general, the more health communicators know about their intended audience, the better they can describe them, and as a result, practitioners can tailor messages and utilize appropriate channels with greater specificity and precision (McKenzie and Smeltzer 2001).

Segmentation strategies rely on an educated selection of variables (e.g. demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral) known or assumed to influence attitudes and behaviors (Slater 1996). Among the many available determinants of audience responses, an extensive amount of communication research has identified a handful of individual difference variables to utilize when segmenting audiences. Individual difference variables including involvement (Petty and Cacioppo 1979), health literacy (Aldoory 2017), locus of control (Rotter 1966), reactance proneness (Hong and Faedda 1996), self‐monitoring (Briñol and Petty 2015; Snyder 1979), and sensation seeking (Zuckerman 1979), stand to offer health communication professionals with important psychographics to consider when designing their next social influence initiative. The aforementioned individual difference variables serve as potential audience segmentation variables as extant research demonstrates how each affects individuals’ response to promotional messages (O’Keefe 2013; Shen and Dillard 2009; Shen, Mercer, and Kollar 2015). In this chapter, each of these individual difference variables are discussed with an emphasis on their application as audience segmentation variables for use in future health communication campaigns.

Involvement

      Involvement is a commonly invoked concept to better understand the situations under which individuals are more or less likely to be persuaded (Johnson and Eagly 1989). Though conceptual definitions of involvement are varied (cf. Allport 1943; Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Johnson and Eagly 1989; Petty and Cacioppo 1986), the term involvement has broadly been defined as the extent to which a topic or issue is considered personally relevant or significant to an individual (Perloff 2003). Several theories of persuasion – including social judgment theory (Sherif and Hovland 1961; Sherif, Sherif, and Nebergall 1965), the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), and the heuristic‐systematic model (Chaiken 1980) – posit that involvement is a fundamental variable affecting how individuals process and respond to persuasive messages. Despite widespread agreement that involvement affects message processing, the directionality of its influence is variable. For instance, according to social judgment theory (Sherif and Hovland 1961; Sherif et al. 1965), involvement is hypothesized to have a direct, albeit negative, effect on attitude change. In contrast, the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) posits that involvement is positively associated with an individual’s elaboration motivation, or desire to engage in issue‐relevant thinking about a topic (see O’Keefe 2013). These mixed findings propelled researchers to develop more nuanced conceptualizations for the involvement construct.

In their meta‐analysis of the effects of involvement on persuasion, Johnson and Eagly (1989) argued that involvement is a multidimensional construct comprising three distinct types of involvement: value‐relevant involvement, impression‐relevant involvement, and outcome‐relevant involvement. Johnson and Eagly (1989) contend that these different types of involvement activate different “aspect[s] of the message recipients’ self‐concept” (p. 290). Accordingly, the persuasive effects of each type of involvement are dependent on the aspect of the self that is activated by the persuasive message. Cho and Boster (2005) validated a measure for assessing Johnson and Eagly’s (1989) three involvement types. Cho and Boster’s (2005) involvement measures have received support across various topics and populations (Lapinski, Zhuang, Koh, and Shi 2017; Marshall, Reinhart, Feeley, Tutzauer, and Anker 2008; Pfau et al. 2010; Quick and Heiss 2009).

      The first type of involvement identified by Johnson and Eagly (1989) is value‐relevant involvement. Value‐relevant involvement represents the relationship between an attitude object and an individual’s enduring values. In Johnson and Eagly’s (1989) words, value‐relevant involvement is “the psychological state that is created by the activation of attitudes that are linked to important

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