Does Culture Matter? Measuring Cross-Country Perceptions of CSR Communication Campaigns about COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought several challenges to businesses and societies. In response, many corporations have supported local communities and authorities in the management of the pandemic. Although these initiatives, which can be considered forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), were highly coupled with explicit CSR communication campaigns, little is known about whether these campaigns were effective. Previous research indicates that culture can shape people’s perceptions of CSR initiatives and communications, suggesting that businesses pay attention to careful consideration of cultural norms for effective CSR communication. However, the COVID-19 pandemic as a new CSR setting may challenge earlier findings. This study empirically investigates whether three cultural factors (individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance) affect public perceptions measured as recall of and favorability towards corporate COVID-19 response initiatives across six countries. Findings from a representative survey of adults across these countries show that respondents in individualistic and collectivistic countries recall these CSR communication campaigns about these corporate COVID-19 response initiatives quite differently, and these are related to differences in power distance and uncertainty avoidance. However, no difference was found in overall corporate favorability, indicating that cultural factors did not affect levels of favorability towards such initiatives. This, we argue, can be explained by the global dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the context of these CSR initiatives. This study contributes to CSR communication literature with empirical findings from a global pandemic setting. It offers businesses and managers empirical grounds to understand the communicative impact of COVID-19 response initiatives, which can inform future CSR actions.

Factors That Influence Risk Perceptions and Successful COVID-19 Vaccination Communication Campaigns With American Indians

COVID-19 vaccinations are the primary tool to end the pandemic. However, vaccine hesitancy continues to be a barrier to herd-immunity in the United States. American Indians (AI) often have higher levels of distrust in western medicine and lower levels of satisfaction with health care when compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Yet AIs have high COVID-19 vaccination rates. We discuss factors that influence AI risk perceptions of COVID-19 vaccinations including the impact of COVID-19 on AI Elders, community, and culture. We conclude with future research needs on vaccination communication and how culturally congruent communication campaigns may have contributed to high COVID-19 vaccination rates.

A Strategic Communication Framework

Decades of research on public communication campaigns has generated a large volume of insights that are often siloed and fragmented across many fields and topic areas, making it difficult for researchers and practitioners to distill these insights into an overarching framework. Further, most research and theory focus only on a select few of the factors that determine the total impact of communication campaigns. In this article, we present a general framework for understanding the effects of strategic communication campaigns. We define the driving force as all the efforts, contexts, and systems that advance the campaign’s goals, and the restraining force as those that restrict the campaign’s goals. The total impact of any driving or restraining force can be understood as the product of its reach, effect, and durability. Reach refers to the proportion of people in the target population that are exposed to the corresponding driving or restraining force. Effect refers to the size of the impact of that force, among those who are exposed. Durability refers to the extent to which the effect of that force lasts over time and/or resists opposing forces. We highlight how this framework can be used to distill, connect, and interpret large amounts of extant research and theory, how it can be used by practitioners to design future campaigns and diagnose the degree of success or failure of past campaigns, and how it can be used by researchers to design research programs and identify persisting knowledge gaps.

Theoretical Considerations for Communication Campaigns to Address Vaccine Hesitancy

Vaccine hesitancy, declared one of the top-10 public health threats in 2019, has become a high priority for public health professionals. Health communication campaigns have the potential to be an effective component of health behavior interventions, including those to promote vaccination. There is limited research examining the effects of theory-based health communications campaigns focused on vaccine hesitancy. Communication campaigns that use stage-matched theoretical constructs as the basis for messages are more likely to be successful in encouraging vaccine uptake by organizing behavioral intent to vaccinate along each stage and identifying which theoretical constructs are most relevant to where individuals are in the behavior change process. This article focuses on the underlying factors affecting adult decisions to get vaccinated and proposes a model through which to segment populations and determine appropriate theory-based communication campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy.

Effective Communication for Water Resilient Communities: A Conceptual Framework

Communication campaigns to promote the importance of water as a vital but limited resource have evolved in many ways. Nowadays, the resources, techniques and skills to deliver effective communication campaigns are far greater than ever before. Over the past decades, there has been a significant body of research towards improving water conservation campaign communication but with limited success in promoting more resilient behaviours on behalf of water consumers. While the media and technology have rapidly evolved and awareness among consumers may have increased, this has not been sufficient to make the communication effective in changing behaviour. Communications to promote resilience among consumers need to reach a wide audience, capture audiences’ attention, build awareness and motivate water consumers to consume water sustainably. This represents a subject in need of further theoretical and conceptual investigation. This research reviews various approaches to effective communication and through a synthesis of the concepts aims to present a new, socio-psychological water conservation conceptual framework. The present conceptual framework integrates emotional appeal, for use on social media platforms and in order to foster more water resilient communities. This framework represents a potentially major contribution in providing guidelines for water sectors to deliver effective video communications on social media platforms.

How do we effectively communicate air pollution to change public attitudes and behaviours? A review

Solutions that engage the public are needed to tackle air pollution. Technological approaches are insufficient to bring urban air quality to recommended target levels, and miss out on opportunities to promote health more holistically through behavioural solutions, such as active travel. Behaviour change is not straightforward, however, and is more likely to be achieved when communication campaigns are based on established theory and evidence-based practices. We systematically reviewed the academic literature on air pollution communication campaigns aimed at influencing air pollution-related behaviour. Based on these findings, we developed an evidence-based framework for stimulating behaviour change through engagement. Across the 37 studies selected for analyses, we identified 28 different behaviours assessed using a variety of designs including natural and research-manipulated experiments, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and focus groups. While avoidance behaviour (e.g. reducing outdoor activity) followed by contributing behaviours (e.g. reducing idling) were by far the most commonly studied, supporting behaviour (e.g. civil engagement) shows promising results, with the added benefit that supporting local and national policies may eventually lead to the removal of social and physical barriers that prevent wider behavioural changes. Providing a range of actionable information will reduce disengagement due to feelings of powerlessness. Targeted localized information will appear more immediate and engaging, and positive framing will prevent cognitive dissonance whereby people rationalize their behaviour to avoid living with feelings of unease. Communicating the co-benefits of action may persuade individuals with different drivers but as an effective solution, it remains to be explored. Generally, finding ways to connect with people’s emotions, including activating social norms and identities and creating a sense of collective responsibility, provide promising yet under-explored directions. Smartphones provide unique opportunities that enable flexible and targeted engagement, but care must be taken to avoid transferring responsibility for action from national and local authorities onto individuals. Multidisciplinary teams involving artists, members of the public, community and pressure groups, policy makers, researchers, and businesses, are needed to co-create the stories and tools that can lead to effective action to tackle air pollution through behavioural solutions.

Are Traffic Announcements Really Effective? A Systematic Review of Evaluations of Crash-Prevention Communication Campaigns

Communication campaigns are commonly used in the traffic and road safety sector to raise public awareness of the importance of avoiding risky road user attitudes and behaviors. Surprisingly few of these communication campaigns evaluate their effectiveness in a formal and comprehensive manner. The core aim of the present systematic review is to identify the type of studies that evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns in this sector, in order to identify and contrast their main findings. This systematic review followed the PRISMA methodology, by means of which the relevant articles based on the search term were identified. A total of 613 indexed articles were filtered, and a final set of 27 articles directly addressing the issue was analyzed. Search strategies were developed and conducted in WOS, Scopus, NCBI, Google Scholar and APA databases. The selected articles point out that, although advertisements alone have a certain positive effect, their effectiveness is substantially increased if they are accompanied by other preventive measures such as legislation or road safety education. In any case, more evaluations of traffic campaigns are needed to identify which techniques are effective and which are not, and which should therefore be replaced by new methods of behavior modification in future communication campaigns.