Message Tailoring

Message tailoring is the ability to target an individual or group of individuals with a health message based on information known about that individual or group in order to elicit a change in behavior or activity. Marketers and advertisers in the corporate world have used this tactic for decades. They learned that something as simple as including a person's name in a direct mail letter, for instance, would increase the chance that the letter was read over a similar letter without personalization. The success of marketing efforts such as these led health communicators to adopt tailoring with health messages to more effectively reach and influence segments of the population.

The use of health message tailoring was led by the efforts of individuals such as professors Victor Strecher of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Matthew Kreuter of Washington University in St. Louis, and Celette Sugg Skinner of Duke University Medical Center. Although definitions vary, with some using tailoring only when it concerns an individual and others using the term in reference to segmented groups, the basic practice is the same.

Because the goal of message tailoring is to actually change the target public's current health-related behavior, these campaigns are typically in the form of an intervention. An intervention is a medical term defined by Stedman's Medical Dictionary as “an action or ministration that produces an effect or is intended to alter the course of a pathologic process.” Specifically, such campaigns are referred to as media interventions mainly because the tool used to change behavior is mass media such as radio, newspapers, television, the Internet, and so on.

The health-related behaviors targeted by media interventions are numerous. Cigarette smoking cessation, alcohol use, sexually transmitted disease (STD) testing, exercise and physical activity, nutrition, and hypertension awareness are examples of health-related behaviors that have been addressed by media interventions.

The success rates of media interventions vary by campaign. Some are successful in reaching target audiences, communicating information about problematic health-related behavior, or achieving a health or behavioral change. To help public health leaders create successful media interventions, W. Randolph and K. Viswanath, in a 2004 article in Annual Review of Public Health, isolated five necessary conditions for a successful media intervention in their comprehensive review of public health [Page 867]campaigns. These included: (1) sufficient exposure of targets to the campaign message/theme; (2) use of social and creative marketing tools; (3) a supportive environment for the message; (4) the use of theory-based campaigns; and (5) midcampaign evaluation and assessment. It would seem, then, that carefully designed and evaluated media interventions, with a tailored message component, are the most likely to succeed.