Orange County Health Department Advertising Research
This campaign was created by a team over the span of an entire semester, with each of us working in many different areas. For the presentation below, I was specifically responsible for the research question, background, and the second insight.
We decided to work closely with the Orange County Health Department to aid them in COVID-19 vaccination efforts.
UNC-Chapel Hill has Campus Health and the Carolina Together campaign in order to combat COVID-19 and we wanted to analyze this from a different perspective.
Through our decision on having OCHD as our client, we found that the overall problem to be solved is the undergraduate UNC student’s willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The age group of 18-24-year-old UNC students was our specific target audience.
Through secondary research by means of a scholarly article, we found specific reasons why people choose not to receive the vaccine. Some of these reasons include potential side effects, the speed at which the vaccine was developed, and the politicization of the vaccine.
Through background research on the Carolina Together site, it was found that 94% of students at UNC are reported to be vaccinated. This leaves 6% left to receive the vaccine. Not only that but, the 94% being vaccinated is self-reported, so there is no telling how accurate all of those reports are, further exemplifying the need for this research in how to reach those that are unvaccinated.
This insight was discovered through our interviews. The nature of these research methods allowed us to gain a more personal background into the issue of receiving or not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
We learned through our discussions that COVID-19 invokes many different emotional responses and reactions. This is a sensitive issue that can be triggering for some individuals.
Through our interviews, we learned that COVID-19 is surrounded by other topics. This is a highly politicized issue. Some individuals feel strongly against the vaccine, then proceed to share their opinions to loved ones. More likely to trust individuals close to them.
This is a huge obstacles when trying to increase vaccination rates
Our group did not consider this with our initial plan, hard to cater to individual hestiancies and misinformation.
For privacy reasons, we cannot share actual responses.
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Based on conversations we’ve had and responses that we received, it seems that it is very difficult to change personal opinions on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Both sides of the argument have formed strong opinions on the vaccine itself and those who do/do not get the vaccine
Based on our survey, those who are not vaccinated reject the ideas of vaccine promotion, which makes increasing vaccination rates difficult to achieve
Our second insight came from the data we collected between the responses from the survey and experiment. The main thing we found was that strategizing campaigns with positive messages would resonate with a wider audience than using a negative message.
As we were analyzing data from the survey, we started to notice a common factor of mistrust and misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccines. Additionally, it was concurrent with research we found that stated this sense of misinformation was one of the biggest concerns for the public. With this, we wanted to see how our research related to the behaviors and attitudes of college students here at Carolina.
One of the most prevalent things we found was that the actions we take as individuals might be opposite of what we recommend to someone else. While we think it’s the best decision for us, it might not suit the situation of another person. One example of this from our survey was the way a person chose to get vaccinated versus the attitude they had toward their parents getting vaccinated.
One aspect of that was students encouraging the vaccine due to their family’s personal health reasons in hopes of combatting COVID, while the other side was too nervous for their parents or elder family to receive the vaccine due to the rarity of severe side effects that, for some, have resulted in death. Although these are two different aspects, it works to show that the concerns with the vaccine are on an individual basis.
Our experiment consisted of two posters in which the main slogan was changed. One poster featured the slogan “Take that vacation you’ve always dreamed of” and the other “do your part, take your shot.” We kept everything else the same on both images, for instance, the line “getting vaccinated is the new self-care” and the image on the poster.
Our hypothesis for our experiment was that people will respond better to a positive vaccine message rather than a negative one. This hypothesis was supported based on our results. Our results also showed that people would rather not be forced to receive the vaccine, further implying the positive messaging strategies.
While our hypothesis was supported with our results, they do not prove positive messaging to be the most effective, but rather provides initial support to pursue further messaging testing to come to a conclusion, while also focusing on slogan editing.
In our experiment hypothesis, we predicted that positive messaging would lead to people being more receptive to the vaccine. However, there was a large divide in the answer given by students who answered “likely” or “unlikely,” with the trend being that those who identified as conservative were unlikely to get the vaccine.
This proved to be consistently one of our strongest indicators to determine vaccine receptiveness, meaning that demographics (rather than advertisements) play a much larger part in vaccine receptiveness.
When it comes to what strategies the Orange County Health Department could use to promote the vaccine, we felt that positive message marketing works better. It’s important for businesses to reach their audience where they’re already at. And since a majority of UNC students are on campus or nearby, Campus Health serves a larger number of the student population.
In addition, people tend to feel more comfortable when they’re doing something that’s closer to home. We thought it would be a smart idea for the Orange County Health Department to also use testimonials and other personal stories to encourage the vaccine since we can all relate to storytelling.
Information Gathering: Given that this is a current/new issue, the concrete research behind it is few and far between. The COVID vaccine is way more controversial than previously researched vaccines which makes it hard to compare findings from those studies to our work
Ethnographies: As a group, we felt like the ethnographies did not provide any valuable insight into our topic, given a lot of the confidentiality surrounding personal health
Interviews: These were able to give us a personal perspective as to how people felt about the COVID vaccine and the pandemic as a whole.
Anonymity: We felt that our quantitative methods, which were received anonymously, gave us more valuable insight into the issues of our topic than qualitative methods. People are more willing to share their real opinion under the condition of anonymity. Face-to-face interaction and the stigma surrounding negative attitudes towards vaccines can lead to individuals hiding their true beliefs in a public forum. We had more negative attitudes towards vaccines expressed anonymously than we did in qualitative interactions
Experimental Error: We mistakenly did not randomize who received a particular graphic in our experiment which led to participants seeing both the neutral and positive message posters. This resulted in priming, which is when the response to the first poster shown influences responses to subsequent material in the experiment.