Week 8: Message Strategies in Health Communication

Cancer - Colorectal Cancer's Screen for Life Campaign Public Service Announcements
This a great website and videos on testimonials of different celebrities encouring people to get their colorectal cancer screening done. It's great since these are people/celebrities that have had this screening done!

Today class was again interesting, the groups did an excellent job on our first Mini-project. Hooray for everyone! Again, I learned a lot in class today. The lecture on “framing our message” with our target audience in the center of our health campaign universe. We learned different ways to shape our message, from using every day relatable situations (slice of life), to using fear, humor, and testimonial from people. So what did I learn about myself? What kind of health campaigns/messages do I listen to? I think we’ve talked about “personal relevance” in class a few weeks ago and I think for me and the way my brain process information, l listen more to people who have been through the struggle. Someone who is promoting colorectal cancer screening should have gone through the procedure. I can relate more to someone who does testimonials since it seems to be more believable…from struggling and surviving breast cancer to suffering from a chronic disease like diabetes. I also tend to pay more attention to health messages that “tug” at the heartstring and realistic compare to my own experiences. I can relate to it since all of the spokesperson has had the screening done. The recommendation is 50 years of age, but it is a successful campaign, at least on me, since I keep thinking as I was watching the video that if they can do it I can too! Not that I need it, not yet anyway….I have a few years to go!
We also talked about “reference” point. What are we comparing these messages to? It was an interesting exercise that Dr. Engelberg did in class about the price of the calculator ($20) and the computer ($2,000). Most of us will care about a $10 savings on a $20 calculator, but not on a $2,000 computer! $10 dollars is $10 dollars…does it really matter that the computer is $2,000? Apparently it does, it’s a way of thinking that we are paying $2,000 anyway so what’s $10 more! Believe me; I am guilty of this way of thinking! There are so many things to think about when creating a health campaign, I’m hoping that I can take away some basic principles we’ve learned in class and apply it when I come back to my real world! Have a great week everyone!