Social Marketing in Health Emergencies: Content analysis of Campaigns from Public Sector and Nonprofit Organizations

ABSTRACT

Communication campaigns to encourage individuals to adopt social norms became a priority in the public sector due to the spread of COVID-19. For this, a content analysis of campaigns issued in English and Spanish for COVID-19 was carried out using Google as a search platform. Fifty-two campaigns launched in 17 countries throughout the year 2020 were analyzed, with a total sample of 504 messages. Research identified that the visibility of the desired behavior was the mechanism increasingly used by the different institutions to inform and persuade the acceptance of new social norms. The campaigns promoted awareness of the virus (descriptive social norms to follow), then they appealed to self-responsibility for contagion, and finally being able to deal with the frustration of confinement. It was identified that most campaigns were merely informative, and that testimony or cultural images were the styles least used.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• health emergencies
• integrated marketing communications
• social epistemology theory
• social marketing
• social norms

Acknowledgment

Authors would like to express their gratitude for the support that the UDLAP Honors Program provided and specifically acknowledge the contributions of marketing student María Alejandra Martínez Avila in data processing and analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10495142.2024.2378931