Framing a Message

Framing a message in a way that is simple, easy to understand, and focused on impacting your target audience in however you may want seems like a no-brainer. But the truth of the matter is, different people are affected by different messages depending on how they are relayed. Our target population for the nutrition campaign is college students. As a group we need to focus on what is important to college age students with low and high involvement in their nutrition beliefs and behaviors. Since undergrad was not a long long time ago I try to think on what types of ads affect me most when it comes to my nutrition and health and why they affect me the way they do.


Kaiser Permanente's Thrive Campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tNlSKfLO2o

This campaign is short and sweet. "THRIVE" because that is what people want to do. Don't just live, but thrive! Live well. And this commercial is simple, not much is said, but it motivates me to go out and be active.

With fear tactics...I was suprised to hear there was only a slight impact. I feel that if it scares me I tend to remember it. Red Aspalt made me weary of bad drivers and bad driving...this is your brain on drugs promoted my feelings about anti-substance abuse messages and behaviors. But my question is, is this because my involvement is already high? Does it only have little effects for those with low involvement? If you think about it, it would makes sense. I am already against certain behaviors and ads that emphasize why it should be scary should only enforce my pre-existing ideas. But it doesn't seem like the article Brian discussed in class looked at this factor. I think this would be an interesting aspect to look into because it can really impact the way one reacts to a health message.

We also talked about how ineffective humor seems to be. I feel that makes sense. If you think about funny commercials, can you recall who's advertisement it was? What was being advertised? If you remember, was it because you it was the first time you heard of the product? If you are anything like me...probably not. Everyone remember's the Budweiser frog commercial but it's probably because Budweiser is already a well known product, and the advertisement is used more for product placement and a reminder of yes we're still around. But it doesn't seem like new products start with humor as a their main form of advertisements.