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Using Message Strategy to Capture Audience Attention: Readers' Reactions to Health Education Publications

ABSTRACT Capturing audience attention is one of the biggest challenges facing health educators. Often, the key target audience is most difficult to reach. In this article, I examine message strategy as a technique for capturing audience attention. I begin by defining message strategy and clustering it into two broad approaches–information/argument and emotion/entertainment. I then discuss a qualitative study exploring readers' reactions to different message strategies used in brochures and postcards about health issues. I propose that readers appear to recognize information/argument message strategies as providing straightforward “facts” about a topic, while emotion/entertainment message strategies use some form of intrigue, emotion, or entertainment to attract attention. I argue that health educators can use message strategies to appeal to different audiences: educators hoping to reach audiences who are actively looking for information may be successful with an information/argument message strategy, while educators hoping to reach audiences who don't know or don't care about a topic may benefit from an emotion/entertainment message strategy.