Vaccine promotion: impact of risk level on attitudes

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of personal relevance, source credibility and advertising appeal type on the emotional and cognitive processing of a direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a meningitis vaccine. Design/methodology/approach A 2 × 2 experiment was used, and path analysis was undertaken to test the hypotheses. Findings Resultant models indicated that unvaccinated (more at risk) and vaccinated (less at risk) participants are persuaded through different pathways. More specifically, vaccinated participants rely more on message credibility than creative strategy to form their cognitive evaluation of the message, whereas non-vaccinated subjects’ cognitive evaluations of the message depend on creative strategy (advertising appeal type) more than message credibility. Differences between individuals who were certain of the vaccine status and those who were not certain of their vaccine status were also apparent. Implications and areas for future research are also presented. Practical implications When using direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a vaccine, advertisers should take into account the perceived risk level of and relevance to audience members. Originality/value Personal relevance and risk are issues which impact the effectiveness of different types of advertising appeals, but less prior research has focused on this aspect of the target audience for direct to pharmaceutical vaccine advertisements.

Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model Application in Examining the Effectiveness of Public Service Advertisements

“…Those with poor health or chronic diseases are seeking preventive care as a result of information in a drug advertisement (Murray et al, 2004). According to Lemanski and Villegas (2018), there are different way to persuade unvaccinated (more at risk) and vaccinated (less at risk). It means that people with greater health needs will be more likely to respond to DTCA by visiting their physicians than others (Brodie, 2001).…”

“…Feimuth et al, (1990), did content analysis and found that 39% of AIDS PSAs directed towards specific audience were structured as a fear appeal. According to Lemanski and Villegas (2018), participants with low health risk rely more on message credibility than creative strategy to form their cognitive evaluation of the message, whereas participants with low health risk subjects' cognitive evaluations of the message depend on creative strategy (advertising appeal type) more than message credibility. Thus, company should be careful about message strategy and creative strategy.…”