WVU students in Evansdale are shown here practicing varying degrees of COVID-19 risk mitigation strategies such as social distancing and masking. New marketing research from the John Chambers School of Economics shows that communications campaigns focused on public health and COVID-19 should avoid political ideology, with implications that transcend the healthcare space.
(WVU Photo/Jennifer Shephard)
Public messages should show respect for individual freedoms and personal choice and leave politics at the door if communicators expect compliance, according to researchers at West Virginia University John Chambers College of Business and Economics.
Messaging needs to hit the “sweet spot,” said Vijay Bharti, a 2021 business administration graduate looking at the effects of public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bharti led research that examined compliance with COVID-19 recommendations and whether public health messages had any impact. it and his colleagues began collecting data at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when health officials were strongly urging people to wear masks and practice social distancing. The researchers analyzed tweets as well as responses from 183 study participants surveyed in February 2021. The bottom line, Bharti said, is that “COVID communications must leave politics out of the messages.”
The study, “‘You can’t make me do it!’: A model of consumer compliance,” was co-authored with Paula Fitzgeraldprofessor of business administration and Elizabeth Gratz, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the time of the research and now an assistant professor of marketing at St. Bonaventure.
Bharti said communicators need to consider three factors that could cause people to react against instructions like social distancing: if the messages make people feel their freedoms are limited, if the messages fail to address such conditions like “Covid fatigue” that can create a sense of complacency. and whether people perceive an action as a matter of personal choice when messages present it as an ethical action.
“If communications address these three factors, then we can increase compliance,” he said.
After graduating from WVU, Bharti now aims to become a doctor. He believes that “much of our research can be applied to the individual doctor-patient relationship and promoting patient compliance with drug prescriptions or physical therapy regimens.”
The research also translates beyond the healthcare space. Bharti pointed to airplanes, stores and restaurants as challenging environments for customer compliance, and Gratz sees their findings informing a number of “old compliance issues, such as age compliance, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis use, even security compliance. at recreational venues like the Astroworld Festival, where 10 deaths and hundreds of injuries last year could have been prevented if safety rules had been better communicated,” she said.
Gratz addressed the textual analysis of the COVID-19-related tweets that Bharti’s Python script scraped from Twitter: tweets about deaths caused by COVID-19 infection parties, government fraud and psychological operations, and exhaustion of essential workers . She discovered recurring patterns of reactions to the COVID-19 messages, laying the groundwork for the hypotheses they would test in the survey phase of the study.
Survey participants ranked photographs showing varying degrees of social distancing. They answered questions about whether they believed social distancing guidelines were “a blow to freedom,” for example, or how likely they thought their friends and family would contract COVID-19. And they provided information about political ideology.
The analysis found that those whose politics leaned conservative were more likely than others to view the COVID-19 mitigation guidelines as a restriction on their freedom and to feel complacent about the risks of COVID-19 and less for others to “frame COVID-19 mitigation behaviors as behaviors that mitigate harm to others,” Bharti explained.
But he provided no evidence that targeting messages to a political ideology would build audiences. Instead, they found that messages will be most effective for anyone, regardless of party affiliation, when they emphasize choice rather than exercising control, when they use language like “can” rather than “should,” and when they frame actions as personal decisions and avoids assigning a moral stigma to non-conformity.
Creating realistic risk perceptions is critical and complicated, Bharti acknowledged. If the perception of danger is too mild, people will not protect themselves. If the perception of risk is too high and people feel anxious, they are more likely to suspect scare tactics or experience COVID-19 fatigue.
“Many people tend to stop taking precautions like wearing masks. They accept the risk of contracting COVID-19 simply because of fatigue. I know I’ve felt this way before and unfortunately a lack of effective communication is what caused this.”
“The fatigue of COVID is real,” confirmed Bharti Fitzgerald’s mentor, “but COVID is still very much with us. Vijay’s research is important, primarily because it points to a path to influencing behaviors that can reduce the transmission of the virus that is independent of political ideology.”
“Maybe,” she said, “we should have focused on the well-being of family and friends from the start of the pandemic.”
Quote: You can’t make me do it!’: A model of consumer compliance
-WVU-
mm/09/08/22
MEDIA CONTACT: Micaela Morrissette
Research Writer
WVU Research Communications
304-709-6667; [email protected]
Call 1-855-WVU-NEWS for the latest West Virginia University news and information from WVUToday.
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.
