Effectiveness of Public Service Announcements Research Proposal

Effectiveness of Public Service Announcements - Research Proposal Example (Erica Weintraub Austina*, 2008) Kiakati believe that use of celebrities can have many benefits and advantages such as - (Anita Elberse, July 2011) Facilitating the identification of brand by consumers Changing the negativity associated with a brand Repositioning a brand Affecting the purchase intentions of the consumers. Celebrities are fickle in nature and although promotions through them may increase brand visibility it may also make your brand related to some negative characteristics. (Veer, Becirovic, & A.S.Martin, 2010) Public Service Announcements are designed to inform the audience about certain aspects or to induce certain behavior in them by the use of mass-media approaches. The important point in most of the public service announcements is that they are not trying to sell a product. They are trying to sell an idea or a belief system. A PSA which encourages people to use public transport system is trying to modify their behavior over a long period of time. Making a person b uy soap is entirely different from making him do a particular thing again and again. (Dan Werb1, 2011) We will try to analyze through this research how effective the use of popular celebrities or respected spokesperson is in creating the final attitude change in the target audience of the PSA. all celebrities responsible for just bringing in the crowd or can they help PSA in the same way they help the FMCGs. Consumers tend to copy their icons and use the products preferred by them ; will they also follow their lead in changing their attitudes towards a particular thing or is it too personal to be affected by a celebrity. We will analyze this particular aspect of PSAs in the research paper – How effective is the use of celebrities for bringing about the attitude change desired by PSAs. Literature review Some properties such as likeability of the celebrity , expertise , trustworthiness and similarity causes a celebrity endorser to become a cause of persuasive information to the audience and also ends up creating a sense of certainty and encourages the user to try the product or the service. Acceptance of a message by a receiver can be influenced by celebrity endorsers as people consider them to be believable sources of information about a product. The balance theory principles emphasize the creation of an emotional connect between the observer and the endorser. This emotional relationship also creates and emotional connect between the audience and the cause. Is this fact also true for a cause espoused by the PSAs? Will a celebrity help in creating an emotional connect of the user with the cause. McGuire (1998) has created a very effective input output matrix for creating effective public service announcements. Along the input axis are important aspect of the message such as source, message factors, channel factors, receiver factors and finally target behaviors at which the communication is aimed at. McGuire says that for the PSA to be effective; the targe t audience must have contact with it, must pay attention to it, like it, understand and learn from the content, agree with it, store the information presented by it and make decisions based on it. (Kang, Cappella, & Fishbein, sep 2009)