National Academy of Sciences | 150 Year Anniversary

Questions? Call 800-624-6242

| Items in cart [0]

The National Academies Press

PAPERBACK
price:$44.95
add to cart

Rights & Permissions

topleft topright

Speaking of Health: Assessing Health Communication Strategies for Diverse Populations (2002)
Institute of Medicine (IOM)

Citation Manager

. "3 Health Communication Campaigns Exemplar." Speaking of Health: Assessing Health Communication Strategies for Diverse Populations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2002.

Please select a format:

BibTeX EndNote RefMan


Page
96
bottomleft bottomright

The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.


Speaking of Health: Assessing Health Communication Strategies for Diverse Populations

gram gradually targeted new and expanded audiences, such as African-Americans, women, and specific age and income groups, among others (Roccella, 2002).

Selecting particular audiences for emphasis or recognizing that the audience for a campaign is heterogeneous is a first step. However, having recognized that heterogeneity, there are many ways that a campaign can adapt to the presence of differing groups in the audience. The process of adaptation is the focus of the next section.

ADAPTATION OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION CAMPAIGNS FOR DIVERSE AUDIENCES

A campaign is made up of many components. Each opens separate avenues for adaptation to segments of an audience. There are generally three broad approaches to adaptation.

  1. Create a single campaign intended to affect most audiences by focusing on what is held in common across audiences. The common approach assumes that apparently heterogeneous audiences differ in some ways, but may share enough characteristics with regard to what influences their behavior, what media they can access, and what message executions will appeal to them so that a single campaign (with its lower costs) will be effective. (An example for an antitobacco campaign, much like the Truth campaign: Focus on not smoking so as to resist tobacco industry promotion of smoking; provide messages that suggest a multiethnic, united youth movement fighting against industry manipulation; use mainstream television channels and programs watched to some extent by most youth; use multiethnic actors and language broadly used by youth in all advertising.)

  2. Create a common campaign with regard to behavioral targets and essential messages, but adapt it for different audiences by varying the primary diffusion channels and specific executions of messages. (For the antitobacco campaign, purchase extra exposures in media more heavily used by African-American or Hispanic

Page
96