Comparing the Effectiveness of Responsible Drinking Messages Tailored to Three Possible ‘Personality' Conceptualizations

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: To combat the public health problem of college student binge drinking, some colleges and universities now require students to complete Internet-based alcohol education programs, some of which present personalized feedback based on behavior and demographics. Within the social marketing literature, compared to audience segmentation based on demographics or socioeconomic variables, audience segmentation based on psychographics (core personal values and motives, see Demby, 1974) has been found to produce more desirable results in terms of attitude and behavior change (e.g., Vyncke, 2002). Tailoring persuasive messages to self-schema (a variation of psychographics) to encourage attitude and behavior change has shown promise in consumer and health domains (Brannon & McCabe, 2002; Brock, Brannon, & Bridgwater, 1990; Pease, Brannon, & Pilling, 2006; Pilling & Brannon, 2007). We investigated whether a thoroughly personalized message tailored to a person’s Big Five personality traits or a message tailored to an individual’s ideal self-schema would be more effective at marketing responsible drinking than tailoring to an individual’s actual self-schema. We expected the Big Five tailored message to be more effective than the self-schema matched message.

Methods:  College students were randomly presented with one of the three types of personalized messages or to a neutral control message in a website simulation, which contained information about activities and services in the participants’ college town, including information about bars. First, participants completed questionnaires measuring their actual self-schema, ideal self-schema, and their Big Five personality traits so that the computer program could later present a message tailored to one of these factors if the participant was assigned to one of these message conditions. The responsible drinking message appeared on the bars web page. We measured message effectiveness with attitude toward the responsible drinking message and beliefs about binge drinking, such that more positive attitudes toward the message and greater agreement with statements expressing the importance of responsible drinking were indicative of message effectiveness.

Results:  Participants had the most positive attitudes toward the self-schema and Big Five tailored messages. Attitudes toward the ideal self-schema matched message did not differ significantly from attitudes toward any of the other message conditions. Participants who received the self-schema matched message believed binge drinking to be a worse behavior to engage in than did those who received the ideal schema matched message or the Big Five matched message. Overall, the Big Five and the ideal self-schema matched messages were only sometimes as effective as and never more effective than the actual self-schema matched messages.

Conclusions:  Our findings support the use of self-schema tailoring over Big Five tailoring in persuasive communication. Tailoring to self-schema is much simpler than tailoring to each of the Big Five personality traits and also allows for generating a shorter message that individuals are more likely to attend to and remember.

Implications for research and/or practice: Our findings have implications for applying self-schema tailoring in mass media social marketing campaigns. For example, given the widespread use of Facebook among young adults, based on the information in their personal profiles, tailored health messages could be presented to Facebook users within the social networking site.