Targeting or tailoring?

Abstract

Healthcare marketers aim to meet the wants, needs, and interests of consumers when developing campaigns to sell health services. Designing campaigns customized to consumer profiles can seem daunting and costly as the wants, needs, and interests of consumers vary greatly. But healthcare marketers need only turn to emerging social marketing literature for insight on maximizing resources and effectively reaching potential consumers. According to Kelly Brownell, author of Food Fight and director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, in 2001 Coca-Cola and PepsiCo spent $3 billion promoting their products in the United States alone. That same year, the “5 A Day” fruit and vegetable campaign from the National Cancer Institute operated with a mere $2 million advertising budget. The largest amount of money that had ever been dedicated to a national antismoking effort – the American Legacy Foundation’s “The Truth” ads – was only $185 million. For health communication campaigns, competing against high-volume advertisers like the soft-drink and tobacco industries means creating quality messages that effectively and efficiently influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of a targeted audience. To this end, many social marketing researchers have found that customizing messages to a particular audience maximizes their strength and influence. Two methods to customize health messages are particularly prominent in health communication research. Message targeting customizes messages to shared characteristics of population subgroups, such as lifestyle factors like recent college graduates in emerging careers in small cities or physically active retirees living in the suburbs. Message tailoring, in contrast, fits messages to individual characteristics, such as personality factors like coping styles or preferences for thinking extensively about choices. This article reviews psychographics and matched messages as specific strategies for targeting and tailoring messages, respectively. Particular attention is given to optimizing resources and effectiveness when using these strategies in developing health communications to market health services.