Communication and COVID-19
Image source Kate Trifo (external link) , Unsplash
“Mind genomics is widely used in the food industry. It’s a key tool in consumer research that helps us to understand consumer decision making and how to communicate with the public more effectively,” said Nick Bellissimo, professor of nutrition and director of the Nutrition Discovery Labs (external link) . “One of the ways we use this tool is to improve public health messaging. Given that the pandemic requires complex messaging, we thought to investigate and see if this understanding of consumer thinking can help us. Our goal was to be able to better communicate with the public in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.” This project was funded by the COVID-19 Rapid Response Grants issued by the Faculty of Community Services in April, 2020.
Normally Bellissimo and his team are investigating truths about metabolism, ingestion and how our bodies work in relation to what we eat. A big part of that is understanding consumer mindsets and the messaging that works on one mindset. “Mind genomics is used to understand consumer behaviour in food choices as well as developing messages to encourage particular behaviours from consumers,” said Bellissimo. “So if we can use this to understand how we can more effectively promote public health choices when it comes to diet, maybe we can use this to understand and more effectively deliver public health messaging when it comes to COVID-19.”
Using these consumer research tools, Bellissimo and his team developed a study to understand how COVID-19 related public health messaging resonated with the public and used that data to understand public mindsets. They did this much like how they would if they were doing a consumer research study. “Understanding the mindsets is important because then you know how to communicate with people based on their thinking. Often different mindsets need different messages or styles of messaging.”
They set out to see if they could identify different ‘mind-set’ and ‘messaging’ relationships concerning public health messaging on COVID-19 and compliance with those public health recommendations.
They identified three specific mindsets and related communication needs from their data. The groups are:
Onlookers: This is a group that actively consumes media and acknowledges the existence of the virus. However, the virus isn’t personal for them yet.
Bow to authority: This group wants messages from trustworthy sources, and the more sources, the better. The source delivering the message is as important as the message itself.
Tell me what to do: This group is hungry for different ways to comply with the regulations. They are the most challenging group to reach and need options, precise instructions and messaging.
“We decided to do this in early March, received ethics approval and got started. These studies can be completed quickly, in just a matter of hours through online panels,” explained Bellissimo. The study was approved in early April. That day, they had 225 participants, half in Canada and half in the United States. This data gave them an early insight into public understanding of the pandemic at that time.
“We immediately shared the results with as many agencies and government officials as possible,” said Bellissimo. “We learned that you couldn’t predict membership in one of these mindsets based on age, gender or ethnicity. There was a fairly consistent mixture of different people in each mindset.”
The study has also been replicated by colleagues in the United States and the United Arab Emirates with remarkably similar results. “One key difference was a much higher level of distrust for government messages in the United States,” Bellissimo said. “The key to encouraging a particular behaviour, or shift in behaviour, is to identify the mindsets associated with that shift. Then, following that, to develop messaging based on those specific and unique ways of thinking.”
“We looked at, for example, a blanket approach to ‘stay home’ messaging. Was that working? And is there a way to modify the message to be more effective with the different mindsets we uncovered? For people in the ‘Tell Me What To Do’ group, the only approach that may work is a lockdown,” Bellissimo explained. “They will ask questions and need very precise instructions. Some of those instructions include the idea that everyone is to wear a mask. Which, you have to remember, that was only beginning to happen in April, 2020, and this group of people needs everyone to be doing it to adopt the message.”
“Mask-wearing was still an active conversation, even a debate, in April,2020. There was still mask shaming at that time last spring. In reality, our data was ahead of the curve, and our recommendations are beginning to play out,” explains Bellissimo.