Interesting Results
This Could Happen To You
Given the volume of advertisements consumers are exposed to, many advertisers have difficulty getting people to pay attention to their messages, but those whose messages attempt to change health-related behaviors face an even bigger challenge. That’s because people tend to believe that they, personally, are not at risk of suffering adverse consequences as a result of their health-related behaviors.
A 2002 study1 shows that one way to overcome this problem is to create messages that focus on behaviors that are strongly correlated with the negative outcome that the advertiser is seeking to prevent and are relatively common. This causes people to pay more attention to the message, re-evaluate their assessment of the likelihood that they personally will experience the negative consequence, and to change their behavioral intentions to avoid it.
Interestingly, the study also found that messages that discuss behaviors that are strongly correlated with the negative outcome sought to be prevented yet that are relatively uncommon actually have the reverse effect: attention diminishes, and so does self-assessed probability of being affected and intention to engage in the desired preventive behavior.
1 Menon, Geeta, Lauren G. Block, Suresh Ramanathan (2002), “We’re as Much at Risk as We Are Led to Believe: Effects of Message Cues on Judgments of Health Risks”, Journal of Consumer Research, 28(4), 533-549.