Conceptualizing health campaign strategies through the level of involvement

Abstract

As moderators of the health campaign process, involvement is divided into enduring and situational involvement. Based on the review of interdisciplinary literatures, a new health campaign model and optimal strategies are proposed. The new model has two dimensions (enduring and situational involvement) and four strategies: an affect‐evoking, an information‐oriented, a cue‐emphasizing, and a balanced‐argument strategy. For the empirical research, a 262 experiment with 143 undergraduate students using four different advertisements was conducted. Generally, the moderating effects of both enduring and situational involvement were supported. Regardless of some deviations from the proposed model, optimal strategies fit into the designated involvement level. Public relations practitioners will be able to choose the optimal message strategy after identifying the characteristic of targeted publics for health‐related campaigns.