Trusting Fergie over Fauci
An opinion on how consumers consider media messages and decide to take action
Influencing attitude change is the core of marketing and advertising success. The goals of most consumer-facing marketing and communications’ professionals are to make people care about a product or service, and realize that their lives could be better if they bought X or did Y thing.
But as someone who prides herself on “wanting to change the world,” I think (most of the time) about attitude change as a communications tool to help encourage more kindness and acceptance for what matters to our planet and each other. For example, I’d like to help change public perception about climate change, highlighting the idea that humanity is likely to be extinct in just a few centuries time if we don’t enact policy changes and drastically change our individual behavior quickly.
So why doesn’t everyone care about our rapidly approaching demise as much as I do? Most would argue that they “care,” but action change requires much more than just caring. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of attitude change, developed in 1986, explains that new information is digested by individuals through either a central or peripheral route. Taking the central route, people evaluate arguments and analyze new information using past experiences and beliefs. With peripheral information processing, individuals may (or may not) change their opinions because of inferences, associations or celebrity endorsements. Generally speaking, I process information centrally, because I am aware of tactics like endorsements and give them little opportunity to sway my decision-making. But professionally, I’ve seen that a lot of “convincing” needs to take place with many audiences, through peripheral processing, for certain attitude changes that are desirable to me personally and for my work success.
I’ve spent the past year working on COVID-19 communications, specifically using social media, and have learned that many individuals look to endorsements or the messenger themself in order to make a decision. For instance, it has been more effective when an athletics-related endorser promotes the COVID-19 vaccine than when an epidemiologist speaks to the effectiveness of the vaccine. Because of this, we have manipulated phrasing and A/B-tested hundreds of messages to better understand how consumers are peripherally processing information that encourages vaccine acceptance. Social media users are more likely to engage with a post if they see someone else engage with or “like” the post, so the idea of bandwagon acceptance should also be considered. Because of this, we’ve spent ad dollars on social media posts about vaccine information, in order to boost engagement and therefore boost acceptance.
My professional experience with pandemic communications reinforces the idea that inspiring action and perception change is more likely to be achieved by increasing people’s motivation to think about the message. How can we convince individuals that slowing climate change and getting a vaccine is more important than many, many other things right now? We must meet them where they’re at, giving them reason to consider the message and finding a way to communicate in a way that helps them take action. Sometimes, depending on the audience, a celebrity endorsement might just be more effective than a fact or statistic.
