An examination of how message fatigue impacts young adults’ evaluations of utilitarian messages about electronic cigarettes

ABSTRACT

Campaigns rely on the repetition of similar messages over time. However, message fatigue can lead people to ignore or resist messages, such as ones aimed at preventing tobacco usage. We implemented a longitudinal design to examine the impact of message fatigue on message processing outcomes in the context of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes); we also tested whether functional matching weakens these effects. Participants with greater fatigue toward health messages about e-cigarettes were less likely to pay attention to and more likely to be annoyed with utilitarian messages about e-cigarette use. At the same time, greater feelings of fatigue predicted higher evaluations of message quality. Functional matching among participants with utilitarian attitude functions did not modify these effects. These findings suggest that fatigue promoted automatic evaluations of utilitarian messages about e-cigarettes, potentially limiting the impact of genuinely novel information, and opportunities exist to design e-cigarette messaging that targets non-utilitarian concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Message fatigue
• functional matching
• e-cigarettes
• tobacco prevention

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the instructors at CSUN who kindly offered extra credit to potential participants and CSUN’s Faculty Development for funding course release time for the first author to complete this project.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article can be obtained from the first author.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/e7du6/?view_only=7d7ecc6f215b472fa5f4da45c244a8cf.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to disclose.