Research Interests
My research program centers on two interrelated paths— intercultural social advocacy promotions and designing campaigns that improve the way social and health-oriented messages are received by and are beneficial to recipients.
My research primarily focuses on the social influence of advertising and mass communication on what people do, say and believe. In other words, it is the search for cultural patterns as they relate to attitudes and behavior in communication, particularly commercial and social advertising communication. I am primarily interested in those patterns connected to social and health communication and intercultural and ethnic advertising strategic messaging.
My research program centers on two interrelated paths: (a) intercultural social advocacy advertising and (b) designing advertising campaigns that improve the way social, health, and environmental messages are received and beneficial to recipients. The importance of this topic comes from three areas.
- An increasing cultural diversification of the United States; this can be easily seen in New Mexico and at UNM. The rapid growth of global or multicultural citizens/consumers provides a great need to research cultural diversity for social and commercial campaigns alike.
- The so-called social diseases (e.g., obesity, alcohol-related problems) is rising among a growing segment of the population, especially ethnic minority groups. This necessitates that social marketing messages succeed in changing behavior patterns.
- Studying social/health communication can help us educate promoters and public officials so that their communication efforts improve the lives of the community.
Future of My Work
My future research agenda has two complementary components.
The first is to continue my research on promotional communication toward culturally diverse population segments. One specific idea that I have is to examine the validity of ethnic consumer segments in an age of multi-ethnic attitudes by entire generations and its impact on ethnicity-directed advertising campaigns. A number of advertisers in the U.S. and elsewhere enjoy marketing successes today by having debunked the notion of ethnic segments and using other segmentations. I intend to determine whether marketing communication components or brand idiosyncrasies explain this "success."
Second, I plan to expand my research program into social marketing/health marketing research, and specifically, health maintenance and disease prevention campaigns. According to the CDC, health marketing campaigns are not only a multidisciplinary area of public health practice, but also a relatively new and innovative approach to educate, motivate and inform the public on health messages. It draws from traditional marketing theories and principles and adds science-based strategies to prevention, health promotion and health protection.
For example, in New Mexico, Native American and Hispanic adolescents are less educated about nutrition and exercise to prevent obesity than White adolescents. This has resulted in much higher susceptibility to obesity-related diseases (e.g., Type II diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular problems). These disparities in health literacy are partially the result of cultural factors (e.g., dietary traditions and avoidance of group exercise) and partially the result of the current campaign itself (target segmentation, message construction, delivery).
I discovered these factors as I completed research for an international comparison project that I submitted in 2006 to the annual meeting of the CDC Diabetes and Obesity Conference. A follow-up essay was presented at an international media research conference in Athens, Greece.
This research extends my research from traditional consumer marketing settings into the larger public health arena. Being involved and collaborate with public health researchers, professionals and organizations has been extremely beneficial and is a goal for me for years to come.
