The Application of Persuasion Theory to the Development Of Effective Proenvironmental Public Service Announcements

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Renee J. Bator, Robert B. Cialdini

The output factors include 12 consecutive response substeps that are all considered necessary if the communication is to be practical. For example, the public must have contact with the message and, having been exposed to it, must pay attention to it, like it, understand and learn from its content, agree with it, store the information and be able to retrieve it later, and make decisions based on it. The final steps include acting from that decision, getting reinforced for such actions, and taking on postcompliance activities (such as convincing others or restructuring one's self-concept) that fortify the new attitude inspired by the message.

McGuire's matrix enables producers of proenvironmental PSAs to consider design alternatives such as whether the spokesperson should be male or female and whether to use a soundtrack or just show the source's face speaking, as a function of how each option may be responded to on the output matrix. Although Atkin and Freimuth (1989) also focused on the importance of design evaluation, they emphasized only a few responses such as liking or recall. McGuire realized that it is important to complete a thorough evaluation of potential PSAs that goes beyond simply picking the one that is better liked. The current "Got Milk?" advertising campaign is under scrutiny because the highly popular and expensive celebrity advertisements promoting milk consumption have correlated with decreased sales (Leonhardt, 1998). Although this is only correlational data, it does indicate that liking a message does not necessarily lead to the desired behavior change. McGuire warned that making a decision to use a message with only limite d feedback from a target audience may mean choosing a PSA that will not be responded to on the final steps, such as behaving in accord with the message.

McGuire's 12 stages provide a practical checklist for creating and evaluating the effectiveness of proenvironmental PSAs. This checklist could be incorporated along with Atkin and Freimuth's (1989) step-by-step plan to produce a comprehensive evaluation of potential proenvironmental communications. For instance, researchers working on antilittering PSAs could use surveys and focus groups along the lines of Atkin and Freimuth's preproduction stage to measure the effectiveness of McGuire's "receiver" factors and determine potential "message" types and "channel" possibilities. Then campaign designers could turn to the pretesting phase and collect reactions to preliminary antilittering messages using McGuire's output axis for the dependent measures. Those communications that are favorably responded to at the later steps (e.g., antilittering behavior) should be most effective when the message is presented publicly. This process of closely examining the audience and their reaction to preliminary messages is consis tent with the advice of McKenzie-Mohr in this issue. He found that social marketing strategies were much more effective if the developers thoroughly considered the target audience and any potential barriers they might have to accepting the message. Once these barriers are recognized, campaign developers can take a more informed approach to designing a successful campaign.