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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of brand and message framing on consumers’ evaluations and purchase intentions of smart health-care clothing. The study also examines the mediating effect of consumers’ evaluations on the effects of the brand and message framing on purchase intentions.

Through an experimental approach, a total of 240 US consumers’ evaluation of smart health-care clothing is compared according to the existence of a well-known brand (vs. none) and message framing (technology-focused vs. fashion-focused).

The results show that consumer evaluation of smart health-care clothing is higher when the product is from a well-known brand, where consumers’ fashion consciousness and health consciousness positively influence such an evaluation as covariates. Message framing, however, did not have an influence that revealed any significant difference between technology-focused and fashion-focused messages. The consumer’s evaluation of smart health-care clothing eventually increased their purchase intentions and mediated the effects of brand on purchase intentions.

Smart health-care clothing refers to clothing that measures, records and manages the user’s activity and health status through conductive fibers or sensors that are woven in the clothes. Despite its benefits, smart health-care clothing is still not widely adopted among consumers, except for a few successful examples. Closing this gap, the results of this study provide implications regarding whether and how brand and message framing maximize consumers’ evaluations toward smart health-care clothing, which the developers and marketers of such products can use to increase the product’s market penetration.

Risk communication is a critical component of individual health decision making and behavior. In disaster situations, it is crucial that risk-related messages are communicated accurately and that they reach and inform target audiences about the steps they can take to protect their health. Despite a global recognition of the importance of risk communication in responding to disasters, there remains a dearth of evidence on how to evaluate the effectiveness of risk communication messages. The purpose of this paper is to develop and assess a pilot tool to evaluate the effectiveness of disaster risk messages.

A pilot evaluation tool was developed using the existing risk communication literature. An expert assessment of the tool was conducted using an open-ended survey and a focus group discussion with 18 experts at the Public Health Agency of Canada in February 2013.

The tool measures content, reach, and comprehension of the message. It is intended to be a quick, internal evaluation tool for use during a disaster or emergency. The experts acknowledged the practicality of the tool, while also recognizing evaluation challenges.

This pilot exploratory tool was assessed using a relatively small sample of experts.

This tool offers public health and disaster preparedness practitioners a promising approach for evaluating and improving the communication and management of future public health emergencies.

This is the first practical tool developed to evaluate risk communication messages in disaster situations.

Effective communication of information is central to integrated care systems (ICS), particularly between providers and care-consumers. Drawing on communication theory, this paper aims to investigate whether and why source effects increase positive evaluations of health-related messages among care-consumers.

A preliminary online survey (N = 525) establishes the discriminant validity of the measures used in the main experimental study. The main study (N = 116) examines whether identical messages disclosed to be created by different sources (i.e. institutional, care-consumer, collaborative) lead to different message evaluations, and whether source credibility and similarity, and message authenticity, explain this process.

In comparison to any other source, messages disclosed to be co-created are evaluated more positively by care-consumers. This effect occurs through a parallel serial mediation carried over by perceptions of source credibility and source similarity (parallel, first serial-level mediators) and message authenticity (second serial-level mediator).

The findings offer guidelines for leveraging source effects in ICS communication strategies, signaling how collaborative message sources increase the favorableness of health message evaluations.

This research demonstrates the efficacy of drawing on marketing communication theory to build ICS communication capacity by showing how re-configuring the declared source of informational content can increase positive evaluations of health-related messages. In so doing, this research extends existing literature on message authenticity by demonstrating its key underlying role in affecting message evaluations.

In the field of public relations and communication management, message evaluation has been one of the starting points for evaluation and measurement research at least since the 1970s. Reliable and valid message evaluation has a central role in message effects research and campaign design in other disciplines as well as communication science. The purpose of this paper is to offer a message testing protocol to efficiently acquire valid and reliable message evaluation data.

A message testing protocol is described in terms of how to conceptualize and evaluate the content and format of messages, in terms of procedures for acquiring and testing messages and in terms of using efficient, reliable and valid measures of perceived message effectiveness (PME) and perceived argument strength (PAS). The evidence supporting the reliability and validity of PME and PAS measures is reviewed.

The message testing protocol developed and reported is an efficient, reliable and valid approach for testing large numbers of messages.

Researchers’ ability to select candidate messages for subsequent deeper testing, for various types of communication campaigns, and for research in theory testing contexts is facilitated. Avoiding the limitations of using a single instance of a message to represent a category (also known as the case-category confound) is reduced.

Communication campaign designers are armed with tools to assess messages and campaign concepts quickly and efficiently, reducing pre-testing time and resources while identifying “best-in-show” examples and prototypes.

Message structures are conceptualized in terms of content and format features using theoretically driven constructs. Measures of PAS and PME are reviewed for their reliability, construct and predictive validity, finding that the measures are acceptable surrogates for actual effectiveness for a wide variety of messages and applications. Coupled with procedures that reduce confounding by randomly nesting messages within respondents and respondents to messages, the measures used and protocol deployed offer an efficient and utilitarian approach to message testing and modeling.

The purpose of this paper is to look across six first-year principals to investigate their engagement with and sensemaking of specific messages of instructional leadership around teacher evaluation.

This research project, a cross-case study, was carried out using in-depth qualitative observations and interviews of six first-year principals over one school year. Sensemaking theory was used to analyze both how and the mechanisms through which principals understood their roles as teacher evaluators.

The results demonstrate that first, principals received a variety of messages about how to conduct teacher evaluations, and second, that connections to specific individuals influenced their associations to specific messages they received about instructional leadership and how they enacted teacher evaluation practices on their campuses.

This is an in-depth qualitative analysis, and therefore is not generalizable to all first-year principals, school districts, or principal preparation programs. However, it adds to the field’s understanding of the meso level of policy implementation, highlighting the process of individuals’ sensemaking and the importance of their informal connections in the associations they make to messages about instructional leadership.

This research adds to the field of principal preparation and induction as it highlights what is important for first-year principals as they build their professional identities. Further, it highlights the variability in principals’ understanding and enactment of teacher evaluation policies, an important feature as this practice is coming to the fore both in current practice and research.

This study adds to an understanding of institutional theory by looking at the interaction between the organizational levels, and further explicates individual actors’ agency within a socio-organizational context. The findings also add to a dearth of empirical studies on the routine of teacher evaluation from the principal perspective.

This chapter defines what road safety advertising campaigns are and the objectives that they typically seek to achieve. The argument put forward in this chapter is that when theoretically informed in their design and sensitive to the array of potential personal, social, and cultural influences which may be at play, road safety advertising can contribute to both reinforcing and transforming contemporary traffic safety culture. This chapter offers guidance to researchers and practitioners in the field regarding relevant theory which may be applied to inform message design and evaluation.

This paper aims to provide an example of how to review information and social-marketing initiatives using financial well-being as a case point.

Literature review and content analysis is used. The audience, channel, message, and evaluation framework is applied. Existent financial well-being initiatives are identified and selected, and further described and analysed in terms of their audience, channel, message and evaluation. The message is further discussed according to the transtheoretical model of change.

Most financial well-being campaigns focus on a particular audience, use a multichannel approach to reach their audience, and report some evaluation, consistent with the audience, channel, message and evaluation framework. Message analysis shows that several initiatives address all processes posited by the transtheoretical model of change to trigger behavior change. Potential areas of improvement and boomerang effects are identified.

Initiatives enhance their effectiveness by using theory, using proper segmentation and channel(s) selection, creating messages based on the audiences’ readiness for change and incorporating evaluation.

Theoretical and practical insight regarding financial well-being initiatives has been achieved. Campaign designers can inspire from this example to conduct their own research and analysis of existent initiatives as one of the starting points in the process.

Political marketing is unable to reach out or influence voters as it once did. This study aims to identify means for political marketers to effectively reach to voters. Specifically, this study examines the role of different WOM/e-WOM political messages (shallow vs deep) delivered through various communication channels on voters’ message evaluation, believability, attitude towards the message and communication, message involvement, voting intentions and WOM/e-WOM intentions.

Two experimental design studies were conducted to test the research hypotheses. Data were collected from age-based voting cohorts through snowball sampling and online consumer panels.

The results suggest that political WOM/e-WOM messages received via different communication modes are perceived differently by age-based voting cohorts in terms of message evaluation, believability and attitudinal dispositions. The perceived credibility of the communication source makes a difference in such evaluations and dispositions. Also, the complexity of message impacts behavioral intentions of age-based voting cohorts differently. Older (younger) voter cohorts are more receptive to complex and detailed (short and brief) messages. Political message involvement mediates the relationship between message believability and voting intentions, as well as WOM/e-WOM intentions.

The results are limited in terms of generalizability due to the experimental nature of the studies. Future research may seek to use actual candidates and examine the effects of moderators such as the cognition-based needs of respondents to engage in central or peripheral processing.

Political marketers can achieve greater credibility and effectiveness and partially restore political marketing’s reputation by honoring three guidelines: construct shallower (or deeper) political marketing messages when targeting younger (or older) voting cohorts through internet-connected (or traditional) delivery modes.

This paper explores an important but under-researched area in political marketing (i.e. the use of WOM/e-WOM messages in political marketing) and identifies important differences in attitudinal and behavioral dispositions of age-based voting cohorts impacted by the choice of communication mode and message complexity. Moreover, the perceived credibility of the communication source (sender) can sway communication mode preferences for age-based voting cohorts.

This study aims to understand how consumers evaluate Made in USA messages that are congruent/incongruent to consumers’ prior expectations about the brand’s US-based sourcing initiatives.

Two separate studies were conducted. Online experiment was designed implementing both message and treatment variance to increase internal and external validity of the study. Data collected from two distinct samples were analyzed using MANOVA and ANOVA.

Findings from Study 1 indicated that consumers’ perceived message credibility, attitude toward message and attitude toward brand were highest for congruent messages, followed by when incongruity was resolved and lowest when incongruity was not resolved. Further, consumers’ brand attitudes before and after message exposure were different, with change being most positive for incongruity resolution, followed by congruity, whereas negative for incongruity non-resolution. Findings from Study 2 indicated that consumers’ general attitude toward brands’ US-based sourcing strategies influenced their brand attitude, as well as moderated the relation between schema congruity/incongruity resolution/incongruity non-resolution and brand attitude.

The findings are helpful for brand managers and sourcing personnel to better invest their resources in US-based sourcing strategies. In addition, the findings of the study contribute and extend theory by identifying a boundary condition.

Word-of-mouth (WOM) literature has identified the roles of source and message in WOM influence, but the relationship between them is yet to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to explore this relationship by examining the mediation of message on the impact of perceived source characteristics from the perspective of the receiver. The paper also considered the mutual relationships between source characteristics and message quality.

A quantitative survey of prospective students was conducted to empirically examine the proposed conceptual model. A sample of 509 respondents was analysed using structural equation modelling.

The findings suggest the significant impact of expertise, trustworthiness, homophily and opinion leadership of the WOM source on the judgement of message quality and the indirect effects on WOM influence mediated by the message quality. The results also indicate the moderating effects of receiver involvement and the valence of the message on the impact of message quality.

The findings of this paper can inform the strategic development of WOM marketing. A deeper understanding of source characteristics and the role of the message may enable marketing practitioners to better target appropriate influencers for seeding programmes that stimulate WOM communication about their brands or products.

This study examines how the receiver’s evaluations of message content mediate the relationship between source characteristics and WOM influence. Source and message are two elements of communication which are processed when people receive information. However, nascent research examines their effects on each other. This research contributes to the understanding of this relationship through an empirical examination of the direct effects of primary source characteristics on perceived message quality.