The problem that this thesis deals with is that the intense competition and increasing consumer power in the health industry calls for the operating companies to take consumers’ considerations into account when advertising their products. It is further suggested that consumers will be extra careful before buying health-related products due to their direct effect on their personal health. Thus, companies selling health-related products must gain an understanding of how consumers form their judgments of the advertisements for the same in order to be able to create persuasive and thus effective advertisements. The purpose of this thesis is to understand consumers’ views of different persuasion strategies used for advertising health-related products and how these affect their willingness to purchase the advertised product. This will be done as a means to provide the concerned companies with a basis for how to create positively perceived, yet effective, advertisements. In order to fulfill the purpose of this thesis a qualitative study was conducted through the use of focus groups. During the focus groups the participants were, among other things, encouraged to discuss their views of three different advertisements for health-related products. Each advertisement represented one persuasion strategy used in the advertising of health-related products. The gathered data was interpreted and analyzed by comparing it with theories from previous research. The study shows that consumers require extensive information and strong evidence behind the arguments provided in advertisements for health-related products. Advertisements that communicate consequences that correspond to consumers’ existing beliefs are likely to be positively perceived. Conversely, if the communicated consequences contradict consumers’ beliefs their responses are likely to be negative. Consumers that are more informed in regards to the products are more likely to critically judge the advertisements for the same. The likelihood that consumers’ attitudes will be reflected in their behavior increases along with the strength of their attitudes.

The use of embedded marketing, the practice of seamlessly integrating advertising messages into entertainment vehicles, continues to grow as media consumption shifts to on-demand forms, and reaching audiences with traditional advertising becomes more challenging. This dissertation investigates cause placement, the term proposed for the social marketing equivalent of product placement, the more widely known form of embedded marketing. Cause placement is the promotion of pro-social causes by verbally and/or visually inserting related elements into entertainment programming. Cause placement merits its own stream of research, because consumers are expected to react differently to the placement of social issues than to the placement of commercial products. However, cause placement has enjoyed little empirical research. This two-essay dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for the relationship between six independent variables, three of which have not been previously investigated in the embedded marketing research, on three dependent variables that measure the effectiveness of cause placement. The independent variables are placement modality, placement centrality, programming genre, image of the character, consistency of the behavior, and brandedness of the cause. The dependent variables are recall of the cause, attitude toward the cause, and intention to support the cause. Each of the two essays tests a portion of the proposed framework. Essay 1 (Chapter 4) investigates the effects of brandedness of the cause and placement modality on the three dependent variables using a 2 (branded/unbranded) by 3 (verbal/visual/ both) between-subjects design. As hypothesized, a branded cause was found to yield better recall than an unbranded one regardless of modality. Contrary to expectations however, there was no interaction effect between modality and brandedness on attitude toward the cause and intention to support the cause. The branded cause resulted in higher attitudes than the unbranded ones, and there were no significant differences among the groups for intention to support the cause, likely due to a ceiling effect reached because of the familiar cause used. The pattern of results plotted for attitude toward the cause was in the predicted direction, such that for the unbranded conditions the both verbal and visual modality had the highest attitude while for the branded conditions the opposite was true. Essay 2 (Chapter 5) investigates the effect of image of the character and consistency of the behavior on the three dependent variables using a 2 (“good guy”/”bad guy”) by 2 (consistent/ inconsistent) between-subjects design. As hypothesized, recall of the cause was higher when the main character’s behavior was consistent with his personality, regardless of the image of the character. Also as predicted, there was an interaction effect between image of the character and consistency of the behavior, such that attitude toward the cause was higher for consistent than inconsistent behavior when the image of the character was “bad guy,” but there was no significant difference in attitude toward the cause for consistent versus inconsistent behavior, when the image of the character was “good guy.” The analogous pattern hypothesized for intention to support the cause did not hold, however, perhaps due to the moral obligation that participants may have felt to follow the promoted behavior regardless of their personal attitude toward the cause. Limitations for both essays are discussed, as well as areas for future research.

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