Humanize Diseases to Build Preventive Care

Successfully improving the frequency with which patients comply with important recommendations from health care professionals requires concerted efforts. Educating the patients can help, especially when the emotion of fear is incorporated into the teaching. People become more likely to comply with measures to prevent a particular disease when they come to fear they are vulnerable to the disease. The fear also serves as a counterweight to overconfidence in making one’s own health care decisions, which has been found to be a danger of patient education.
     Researchers at Zhejiang University, Northwestern University, and University of Chicago increased the perception of vulnerability by anthropomorphizing the disease. Anthropomorphized items have human-like characteristics. This might come from how the item looks, in a picture or name of a person on the packaging, or in the way an advertisement or the persuasion agent describes the item. Techniques used in the disease-anthropomorphizing studies included referring to a disease as “Mr. Coronavirus," not just “Coronavirus” and having the disease talk about itself (“I am breast cancer” instead of “We want you to know about breast cancer”) in the multi-paragraph messages.
     Those people reading the anthropomorphized messages were more likely to express interest in taking preventive health care measures.
     The anthropomorphism was less effective in building preventive health care compliance when a consumer already felt close to a risk factor for the disease or felt otherwise highly vulnerable to the disease. For others, anthropomorphizing could help ease the complex challenges of preventive health care compliance.
     This technique uses anthropomorphism to make an item fearsome to the consumer. More often, marketers anthropomorphize an item to enhance its friendliness. For example, researchers at Northwestern University, University of Cologne, and South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University found that a properly anthropomorphized item gains the persuasiveness of a human salesperson. This decreases the shopper’s feelings of responsibility for purchasing the item. They can blame the item for them giving in, just as they would blame a compelling sales pitch: “I couldn’t help myself.”
     The researchers say there must be a desire for the item in the first place. The tactic does not, in itself, stimulate the desire. Still, the desire need be only sufficiently large to motivate purchase when the self-control resistance is diluted. Related to this, the researchers urge us to use the tactic ethically. In reporting their findings, they specifically expressed clear concerns about misapplications of anthropomorphism in public health initiatives.

Successfully influence the most prosperous & most loyal consumer age group. For the specific strategies & tactics you need, click here.

Click for more…

Back Off for Better Adherence 

Check for Empowered Shoppers’ Compliance 

Anthropomorphize Partners & Servants 

Humanize the Item into a Salesperson 

Stop Threatening My Buds 

Machine Methods for Proper Nutrition