Audience Segmenting and Tailoring

Question 1

What is audience segmentation?

Answer 1

• When you divide a population into groups (segments!) whose members share meaningful characteristics
• Selecting the segments you want to target = target audience
• Segmentation = designing messages that influence people in a subgroup to adopt a recommended behavior

Question 2

Why use audience segmentation?

Answer 2

• One size fits all message doesn’t work
• Health campaigns aim to reach specific groups

Question 3

Ways to segment

Answer 3

• Demographics
• Psychographics (personality, opinions)
• Behavior-specific variables (knowledge, attitude toward, and current behavior)

Also need to consider:
- Types of information and motivation is needed
- Preferred comm channels is needed

Question 4

Which segments should we target?

Answer 4

Things to consider:
- The need of the audience
- Segment size
- Impact (readiness to accept message + likelihood to adopt behavior change)
- Accessibility
- Political views

Question 5

Primary and Secondary audiences

Answer 5

Primary:
- The people whose beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors we’re trying to influence directly
Secondary:
- The people who can influence primary audiences

Question 6

Ethical Issues

Answer 6

It’s not possible to help everyone.
- Should campaigns target people who are most likely to accept a message?
- Should campaigns target people with the highest risk even though they’re hard to reach/least likely to accept a message?
- Should campaigns try to reach the most people or the people who need help the most?

Question 7

What is Tailoring?

Answer 7

• Health messages intending to reach ONE PERSON
• Health messages that are based on characteristics unique to an individual
• There must be individual assessments of participants
  ex. survey of an individual’s attitudes, beliefs and self-reported health behaviors

Question 8

The Rationale for Tailoring

Answer 8

• Irrelevant information is eliminated, the info that remains is personally relevant
• Individual is likely to pay more attention to something if it’s seen as personally relevant –> more likely to have an effect on them

Question 9

Strategies for Tailoring: Personalization

Answer 9

• Identification: use the person’s name
• Customization: “the information in this email was created just for you”
• Contextualization: enhance the relevancy
  ex. if someone is very religious, use religious language (prayers, power of God)

Question 10

Strategies for Tailoring: Feedback to individual

Answer 10

• Descriptive feedback: Tell them about themselves
  ex. you walked 2x as much today as you did yesterday
• Comparative feedback: Use others as a point of reference
  ex. you walked 1.5x more than your neighbor
• Evaluate: Offer inferences and judgment
  ex. you’re so close to today’s walking goal

Question 11

Strategies for Tailoring: Content Matching

Answer 11

• Attempts to direct messages to a person’s status on key determinants
• Match content to a person’s attitude toward the behavior, level of self-efficacy, level of health literacy and stage of change

Question 11

Strategies for Tailoring: Content Matching

Answer 11

• Attempts to direct messages to a person’s status on key determinants
• Match content to a person’s attitude toward the behavior, level of self-efficacy, level of health literacy and stage of change