SOCIAL MARKETING AND PUBLIC HEALTH: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON ASSESSING PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS SOCIAL ADVERTISEMENTS

The focus of this empirical research was to gain understanding of the behaviour of people when they come in contact with increasing number of social advertisements in the domain of health. The lack of research meant that there was no specific and definite information about this research question but there was some understanding from a study only on anti-smoking advertisements which suggested that there is an inverted “U” attention curve to such advertisements. Moreover, numerous studies on commercial advertising, from where social advertising draws its principles, indicate that people tend to avoid commercial messages and even become “blind” to it. For the purpose of data collection, a survey of 20 people was carried out who were given a magazine, modified with inserts of social advertisements. For triangulation, a video recording was also carried out. The findings from the empirical research make it clear that people do give attention to social advertisements, at-least the ones related to their health and well- being. It was also observed that the advertisements which conveyed the message in a negative manner, i.e. by using disturbing visuals, do attract a lot of attention. The findings suggest that participants more or less were equally distributed to three categories of people concerning their attention on social advertisements: a) attention depended on the individual advertisement, (b) attention was equal for all advertisements, and (c) attention increased initially but decreased later with every viewing of an advertisement.