The Effects of Recurrent Mortality Salience Mediated By the Availability Heuristic on Risky Behavior and Subjective Probability

Negotiating the challenges of communicating HIV/AIDS messages, which include stigma, conflicting cultural ideals, and politicallycharged resource constraints, requires a systematic stream of research. Using a series of phenomenological interviews in our exploration of the main constituencies in successful message development and delivery, namely the creative producers, the message developers, and the target audience, we acknowledge the contributions of Cultural Studies theory (Hall 1993) and to a lesser extent the Political Economy of Media (Schiller 1995). Summary According to UNAIDS, in 2003 approximately 38 million people globally were estimated to be living with HIV and nearly 3 million died from the disease (www.unaids.org). In fact 95% of the people living with HIV/AIDS are in the developing world with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries suffering the most. Although awareness and knowledge of AIDS levels are steadily increasing among targeted populations, the spread of AIDS in these countries continues to rise at alarming rates. In response to repeated calls for transformative research and to the moral mandate for a compassionate response to the world’s AIDS crisis, this paper—on an admittedly micro level—investigates the impact of culture and government in mediated communications about HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention in the Caribbean (Rothschild and Anderson 1998; Nowak and Siska 1995; Hill 1993; Mody 1991). Negotiating the challenges of this sensitive topic, which include stigma, conflicting cultural ideals, and politically-charged resource constraints, requires a systematic stream of research. Using a series of phenomenological interviews in our exploration of the main constituencies in successful message development and delivery, namely the creative producers, the message developers, and the target audience, we acknowledge the contributions of Cultural Studies theory (Hall 1993) and to a lesser extent the Political Economy of Media (Schiller 1995). This study focuses on the perspective of the producer of the messages (i.e., creative personnel). Conceptualization Cultural Studies theory’s most applicable assertion in the context of this study is its challenge to the linear “sender-message-receiver” pattern of traditional communication theory. According to Hall (1993), there are several complex relationships within each step of the communication process and they are often iterative and vulnerable to what is termed that “oppositional readings” where the intended 476 / WORKING PAPERS meaning of the message is lost or misinterpreted. As a result the audience is empowered and can now be seen as active participants in the communication process. This concept of audience participation is not new to the marketing literature and has been addressed in terms of message comprehension (Burnkrant and Unnava 1995; Greenwald and Leavitt 1984), ascribing meaning (McQuarrie and Mick 1992, Mittal 2002; Thompson, Pollio and Locander 1994), and experiential consumption (Arnould and Price 1993; Bitner 1992) among other concepts. Additionally, Cultural Studies theory holds that in the course of communication another series of relationships determine what is produced and how it is produced. It is this aspect of the process that is the focus of this particular endeavor—the relationship between the message producers (i.e., advertising agencies and creative shops) and the message developers (i.e., government and community-based organizations). The cultural background of the message designers themselves is significant as the collective experiences of the message designer may help or hurt the message production process. For example, a message producer who belongs to the same cultural background of the audience “. may be more knowledgeable about their problems, but may share their caste and class prejudices. ” (Mody 1991, 105). Those prejudices may very well be the ones which contributed to adverse conditions for the audience—conditions which the communication campaign may be designed to reverse or eradicate (e.g., HIV/AID stigma). As Johar, Holbrook and Stern (2001) have duly noted, creativity is appreciated in the marketing discipline, but rarely studied. Much of the literature surrounding the creative aspect of advertising revolves around consumers’ response to various forms (Stewart and Koslow 1989; McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Clow, Roy, and Hershey 2001), the interpersonal relationships among agency personnel and between client and agency (Thompson and Haytko 1997), or the motivational perspectives of a career in art direction or copywriting (Kover, James, and Sonner 1997; Young 2000). The call for scholars and practitioners to think more about the “creative spark, which drives much of advertising” remains virtually unanswered (Zinkham 1995). Consequently, it behooves marketers to gain a richer understanding of the lived experience of the creative personnel who bring these messages to fulfillment. Method The proposed study will take place in May 2006 and is in response to an initial round of research by a native graduate student, which dealt with three key issues: 1) assessing the baseline knowledge of key HIV/AIDS issues among the producers and recipients of the message, 2) determining the degree of experiential overlap between these two groups, and 3) gauging the effectiveness of message communication. It considered three main constituencies: 1) the producers and developers of the work (via 11 interviews), 2) the target audience (via a five-person focus group), and 3) the crafted messages themselves (via content analysis of 17 posters). No formal hypotheses were submitted. All activity took place between January and June 2003; however the communication artifacts were used island-wide between 1999 and 2003. The results showed there was acceptable baseline knowledge of key HIV/AIDS issues among the producers and selected recipients of the message; however the degree of experiential overlap between these two groups was ambiguous as target audience participation was decidedly problematic. In a similar vein, the lack of a structured research instrument made the task of evaluating messages effectiveness difficult to ascertain. Before developing a subsequent round of research to address the gaps in the preliminary study and collect more statistically compelling data, the study has been reduced into smaller segments, the first being conversations with the producers. Participants will be asked to describe the events that led up to involvement with this project per the guidelines put forth in Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1990) for phenomenological interviewing. Interviews will be conversational in nature with the interviewee leading the exchange (both researchers will be present whenever feasible and appropriate). Rather than include explicit inquiry about the professional relationship with non-profits and public sector organizations or the impact of cultural heritage on their work, those lessons are expected to emerge from the data. The interview transcripts will be revisited using a deliberately iterative interpretative approach (Thompson 1997). Current research objectives revolve around gaining a richer understanding of the following areas of inquiry 1) each participant’s personal journey in their career, 2) the knowledge of key HIV/AIDS issues among the producers, and 3) the process of negotiating form and content of the HIV/AIDS production project. This should help to develop a more theoretical understanding of the process used in message production and uncover any latent patterns in both the content and construction of the mediated communication. Two frameworks will likely guide the retrieval of meaning from these narrative accounts. The first is the Social Adaptation of Thompson’s Hermeneutic Framework, which includes the following constructs: 1) perception of benefits; 2) consumer resistance; 3) countervailing consequences; and 4) countervailing socio-cultural forces (Rothschild and Andreasen 1998). The second is the UNAIDS/ Penn State framework, which affirms five inter-related, behavior-shaping contextual domains—government policy, socio-economic status, culture, gender relations and spirituality (Airhihenbuwa, Bunmi, and Obregon 1999). Findings/Implications Preliminary findings from the first study suggest a possible relationship between “consumer resistance” (from the Thompson framework) and “gender relations” (from UNAIDS/Penn State framework), which may help explain, for example, why messages that feature a woman purchasing condoms lack credibility within the Caribbean context. Other issues such as the use of Jamaican patois (a national dialect of broken English), the challenge to solicit the insight of political influencers without obligation to physically represent them in posters, and the need to honor both legislative and cultural restrictions on the type of information shared (e.g., fear appeals or heavily rational, numbers-driven tactics are discouraged and likely will not be funded), exemplify the intersection of theory and practice within a social marketing context and offer tactical routes to improving message effectiveness. Nevertheless, it is anticipated that a richer understanding of the producer’s perspective will further illuminate the meaning of the preliminary findings. References Airhihenbuwa, C. , Makinwa, B. , & Obregon, R. (2000), “Toward a New Communications Framework for HIV/AIDS”, Journal of Health Communications, 5 (Supp), 101-111. Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 34) / 477 Arnould, Eric J. and Linda L. Price (1993), “River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter,” Journal of Consumer Research, 20 (1), 24. Bitner, M. (1992), “Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees,” Journal of Marketing, 56 (April), 57-71. Burnkrant, Robert E. and H. Rao Unnava (1995), “Effects of Self-referencing on Persuasion,” Journal of Co