Information about My Target Audience on the Campaign Against Distracted Driving

Hello,
I uploaded the topic of the final paper.
Thank you!
Think about the target audience you have selected for your final paper. What do you know about your audience? Do you have any information about them that might inform your decision to use a rational or an emotional appeal? If you don't have the information you think you need, what information would you like to gather to inform your message design?

My final topic is how to create a campaign against distracted driving targeting young individuals aged 18 to 28 years. One possible attitude would be to show how people who lose their loved ones due to accidents caused by distracted driving grief. The attitude can be triggered by sharing pictures of damaged cars on social media so that the target audience can fear being involved in such road crashes. The proper channels to use to reach the target audience are Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. The campaign should use two compliance-gaining strategies, including punishing activity and the activation of impersonal commitments (Gass & Seiter, 2014). As such, the former makes the young people avoid distracted driving, and the latter makes these individuals feel bad if they do not comply with the information in the campaign.

The recommended best design feature related to the attitude above is to include images of cars involved in accidents and incorporate statistics. For instance, in 2019, more than 3,100 individuals died, and 424,000 were injured from accidents caused by distracted driving (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). The most significant thing that a communication practitioner should always remember is that persuasive communication campaigns are organized and contain influential messages to the target population (Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). As a result, the language used should be simple and easily understood by the targeted group of individuals.

The persuasion model that informs my recommendation is the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (ELM). Notably, the two key routes of this model are cognitive elaboration and peripheral processing. Cognitive elaboration entails thinking about the message content, reflecting on the information in it, and scrutinizing the presented evidence. In addition, the peripheral route focuses on cues that are not related to the message directly (Gass & Seiter, 2014). The ELM is the best model to use since it ensures that the message is communicated clearly, and other effects or design features can be used to impress or attract the target audience and probably contribute to massive sharing of the campaign ad. 

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (2022). Distracted driving. Transportation Safety. Retrieved 3 October 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/distracted_driving/index.html#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20over,a%20distracted%20driver%20in%202019.&text=About%201%20in%205%20of,or%20otherwise%20outside%20a%20vehicle.

Gass, R. H., & Seiter, J. S. (2014). Persuasion: Social influence and compliance gaining (5th ed.). Pearson Education Inc.

Gass, R. H., & Seiter, J. S. (2011). Persuasion, social influence, and compliance gaining (4th ed.). Pearson Education Inc.

Stiff, J. B., & Mongeau, P. A. (2003). Persuasive communication (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.