Extended Parallel Processing Model: How CDC launched a successful tobacco educational campaign.

This summer, when I got a chance to return to Vietnam, I had one mirthful conversation with my family, among many other mirthful conversations that we had. This conversation was brought up after my mom discovered a packet of cigarettes hidden inside the storage compartment under the seat of my dad’s scooter. After much to what I think was an unfathomable and silly denial, my dad finally admitted he had failed to quit smoking despite not smoking for almost two years.

Why was this conversation mirthful? - Well, because we just couldn’t believe how stubborn my dad could be, trying to defend something that the evidence was all against, and how embarrassed he turned as he got caught by his wife in front of his children.

As a family, often what we do is laugh at the other person’s silly behaviors.

On a more serious note, we are concerned about his smoking. I thought of him and that conversation after I encountered the Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign launched by the CDC. It was a cleverly designed and executed public health communication campaign.

The Tips campaign essentially features real stories of real people from various backgrounds who have been grappling with serious long-term health effects from smoking and secondhand smoke exposure. The use of evocative images, narrative storytelling, and memorable messages allow the target audience, who is smokers, to understand how former smokers suffer from diseases and their journeys of successfully quitting smoking. The campaign also leads the audience to realize the emotional and financial hardships smoking-related conditions exert on family members. The insights behind the campaign include the finding that most smokers already know smoking is deadly, and the fear of dying does not incentivize them to act on quitting. What more strongly incentivizes them to quit smoking is witnessing the excruciation of living with a chronic smoking-related illness and picturing how that would impact their families.

One of the print ads from CDC's Tips campaign

Theoretically, the Tips campaign is an excellent example of the Extended Parallel Processing Model. In the model created by communications scholar Kim Witte, a health risk message can be designed to maximize danger controls and minimize fear controls through four following components: severity, susceptibility, self-efficacy and response-efficacy. How they work is that when a message communicates enough levels of severity and susceptibility associated with a health risk behavior, the audience will perceive a threat appeal. And when there are enough levels of self-efficacy and response-efficacy being communicated, the audience will perceive an efficacy appeal. Together, threat appeal and efficacy appeal generate protection motivation within the audience, leading them to accept the message and take action. The Tips campaign addresses these four components handsomely:

• Severity: the campaign emphasizes severity by repeating stories of people suffering from heart attacks, stroke, and lung, throat, or oral cancers after they spent almost their whole lives smoking. It also uses evocative, graphic images.

• Susceptibility: the campaign features participants from diverse backgrounds, indicating that anyone can be a victim of smoking.

• Self-efficacy: the campaign offers various solutions the audience can take, including free, confidential coaching through quitlines and detailed information on how to get quit-smoking medicines.

• Response-efficacy: the campaign highlights stories of former smokers who had been ill but sought help and successfully quit smoking for good. It is proudly shared that more than one million people in America have quit smoking because of the Tips campaign.

What is critical in this health communication model is that while the perceived levels of threat and efficacy both need to be high, the perception of efficacy ought to be greater than that of threat in order for the audience to feel motivated and engage in health-improving behaviors. The Tips campaign tackles this adeptly. The campaign primarily features former smokers, most of whom turned from smokers to nonsmokers after receiving help from Tips and CDC programs, signifying a heightened level of efficacy.

CDC's Tips has massively impacted many people, most of whom turned from smokers to nonsmokers, signifying a high level of efficacy.

Finally, what is so cool about the Tips campaign is that it produces messages in various languages besides English, and Vietnamese is one of them. I eagerly shared with my dad the ads written in Vietnamese through a text message, hoping the ads could help me tell him what needed to be told.

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Date published: September 6, 2022

Programs used: Word & Grammarly

Brief description: A case study of CDC's Tips from Former Smokers campaign and the application of

Extended Parallel Processing Model.

References: (links are all inserted above).