Vaccine promotion : impact of risk level on attitudes

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of personal relevance, source credibility and advertising appeal type on the emotional and cognitive processing of a direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a meningitis vaccine. Design/methodology/approach: A 2 × 2 experiment was used, and path analysis was undertaken to test the hypotheses. Findings: Resultant models indicated that unvaccinated (more at risk) and vaccinated (less at risk) participants are persuaded through different pathways. More specifically, vaccinated participants rely more on message credibility than creative strategy to form their cognitive evaluation of the message, whereas non-vaccinated subjects’ cognitive evaluations of the message depend on creative strategy (advertising appeal type) more than message credibility. Differences between individuals who were certain of the vaccine status and those who were not certain of their vaccine status were also apparent. Implications and areas for future research are also presented. Practical implications: When using direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad for a vaccine, advertisers should take into account the perceived risk level of and relevance to audience members. Originality/value: Personal relevance and risk are issues which impact the effectiveness of different types of advertising appeals, but less prior research has focused on this aspect of the target audience for direct to pharmaceutical vaccine advertisements.