Is Health Behavior Consumer Behavior? Health Behavior Determinants, Audience Segmentation, and Designing Media Health Campaigns

Abstract

This chapter explores the conceptual distinctions between health behaviors and consumer behavior, examines influences on health behavior, and discusses how audience segmentation techniques might be tested appropriately and applied to health promotion efforts. Public health decision makers and health educators slowly have begun to incorporate marketing theory and techniques in promoting health behavior change. The basic models for use of mass media in health promotion campaigns may be ill-suited to the task of influencing health behaviors. Self-efficacy has proved to be a useful predictor of health behavior and behavior change. Because health behaviors have a long history for each individual, the determinants of those behaviors stretch back through time as well as rippling concentrically outward through family, friends, community, and reference groups. Health communicators by and large are aware of the importance of formative evaluation. Usually formative evaluation takes the form of pretesting messages, not of research on audience characteristics, which should inform all elements of campaign planning and design.