The Effectiveness Of Message Tailoring

In communication, tailoring is the customization of a message for an individual based on his/her characteristics, beliefs and attitudes. Theories about message tailoring are coming from psychological hypothesis that describe how individuals process and respond to personalized information contained in persuasive messages. The Elaboration Likelihood Model, created and analysed by John Cacioppo and Richard Petty, suggests that an individual is more likely to pay attention to the customized messages and process them more effectively if they include relevant to him/her information or content. The primary approach to tailoring is personalization, which takes into account person’s characteristics such as name or age while framing the message. Tailoring by personalization as well as targeting by demographics offer customization, but very tenuous. Although researches suggest that using both tailoring as well as targeting methods increase the message effectiveness, applying one or the other method might be more appropriate for a specific condition.

Researching different Yale studies, we found out that audience characteristics play a very important role in communication effectiveness and, moreover, personal differences specify conditions for effective communication process. Nowadays product or service providers are trying to dig a little bit deeper into consumers’ personal characteristics and not only target them by socio-demographic characteristics such as age, race, gender, ethnicity and language, for example. These traits can easily be understood from actions on social media platforms by investigating likes, posts, purchases and etc. Applying regression models helps to predict consumers’ personality, sexual orientation, religion, political views and even current moods and thereby tailor messages according to individuals’ characteristics. However, there is not enough research and evidence on the importance of person’s psychological factors and their influence on consumer behavior in comparison to a big amount of studies on the significance of demographical aspects. Factors previously used in consumer research to segment audiences, range from demographics to behavioral characteristics, although these targeting methods are too broad and therefore not effective. It is known that the needs, wants, and desires of the individual consumers are not always taken into account by one-dimensional variables.

Most of the research studies on the effectiveness of message tailoring are coming from the medical field and are continuously examined. Experts of health communication Celette Skinner and Matthew Kreuter describe message tailoring as a process that match the message to the individual. According to Noar, Benac and Harris (2007) tailoring messages about health behaviour change to individuals is very common and effective and, moreover, several factors that control the effects of tailoring are known. The authors suggest that, first of all, tailored messages control behavior change including the awareness of a problem, decisions on what to do, behavior implementation and etc. Secondly, tailored messages are framed in terms of whether they can satisfy one’s intrinsic goals like well-being or health. Although they do not always serve the extrinsic goals such as make or save money, comfort. Furthermore, researches of tailored health messages suggest that person’s goals or motivations for changing his/her behavior are equally effective and, moreover, what is important is that the messages have to correspond with the motivation.