Effective Communication with Vulnerable People
Michael Puntiroli, Sascha Alavi, Valéry Bezençon & Bruno Kocher
Résumé |
Billions of people worldwide experience vulnerability in different
ways. States, nonprofit and even private organizations develop
offers to support vulnerable individuals. It is however unclear how
to best encourage such individuals to engage with these offers that
are designed to help them. We conducted a field experiment study,
in the form of a direct marketing campaign. A total of 9002
randomly selected unemployed people received one of six support
messages by SMS, informing them about trainings that could help
them find a new job. The support message was either a plain message
plus a link to the courses (control), or communicated additional
monetary or psychological value. We measured whether participants
engaged with the offer. The results showed that all the support
messages that communicated additional value generated less
engagement compared to the plain control message. Moderation
analyses using primary and district-level secondary data associated
to vulnerability further highlighted that the level of vulnerability
indeed enforces this tendency to mistrust value communicated in
messages. The findings suggest that for vulnerable people a more
defensive, careful, communication approach is required to foster
engagement in well-intentioned offers. |
Mots-clés |
Vulnerability, unemployment, marketing communication, engagement, poverty, value communication |
Citation | Puntiroli, M., Alavi, S., Bezençon, V., & Kocher, B. (2022, 9 June). Effective Communication with Vulnerable People. Paper presented at Marketing and Public Policy Conference, Austin. |
Type | Actes de congrès (Anglais) |
Nom de la conférence | Marketing and Public Policy Conference (Austin) |
Date de la conférence | 9-6-2022 |
URL | https://www.ama.org/events/academic/2022-ama-marketing-an... |