MMHA 6800 Week 5 Message Testing Report Example

What Hurried Parents Heard: A Message Testing Report on Three Headlines for a Pediatric Urgent Care Launch

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6800: Marketing Management and Business Communication for Healthcare Administrators

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Hurried Parents Heard: A Message Testing Report on Three Headlines for a Pediatric Urgent Care Launch

Purpose

Before the launch campaign for Brightwater Kids Urgent Care, the children's site that the invented Brightwater Health system is opening at Maple Crossing, the agency proposed three headlines. This report puts them in front of parents in the target audience. It asks two questions about each: what did parents understand the site to offer, and what did they believe was being promised? That second question carries equal weight here. A headline that parents like but read as a promise of emergency care would send the wrong children to the site.

Headlines Tested

Table 1

Headlines Proposed by the Agency

Each headline carries the cleared position in a different way. Headline C uses a comparison the Week 3 claims review had already flagged.

Method

Twenty-four parents of children under twelve living near Maple Crossing were recruited through two pediatric practices and a school newsletter. To mimic the real moment of decision, each parent saw one headline on a phone screen for five seconds, in the evening, while a researcher played a recording of a crying toddler in the background. The parent then answered three open questions: what is this place, what would you bring your child there for and what is it promising you? Each parent saw all three headlines in a rotated order on different evenings to limit order effects. Answers were coded by two reviewers. The counts below are illustrative.

Testing messages with the intended audience before a campaign is a basic step in health communication, and tailoring messages to the audience's situation, rather than to the sender's view, improves their relevance (Kreuter & Wray, 2003). The five-second exposure and background noise were chosen because parents encounter these headlines while distracted, not while studying them.

Results

Headline A worked because it names problems. Parents who saw "fevers, sprains and earaches" could answer what they would bring a child for without guessing. Nineteen of twenty-four named a fitting reason. Only one believed it offered emergency care.

Headline B was the most liked in informal comments but the least understood. "Kids' care when you need it most" suggested a pediatric practice, an emergency department or a telehealth service, depending on the parent. Vague reassurance leaves parents to fill in the meaning, and they fill it with whatever they need at that moment.

Headline C was understood as children's care but carried two promises the site cannot keep. Eleven parents believed it promised emergency-level care, reasoning that a place offered as an alternative to the emergency room must handle the same problems. Twenty believed it promised a short wait, which the site has no data to support. One parent said she would take her son there with breathing trouble "because it says skip the ER." That single answer is reason enough to drop the headline.

Table 2

What Parents Understood and Believed Was Promised (Illustrative, 24 Parents)

Headline A was understood best and promised least. Headline C was understood but read as a promise of emergency care and short waits by most parents.

Why Headline C Fails

Headline C fails on accuracy, not appeal. Its comparison with the emergency room implies equivalence for the problems families take to the emergency department, which the site's positioning explicitly rejects. Federal guidance on health advertising treats the net impression of an advertisement as its claim, regardless of the literal words (Federal Trade Commission, 2022). The net impression for nearly half of the parents tested was that the site replaces the emergency department. The wait claim compounds the problem. Studies of exaggeration in health communication find that small overstatements in a source tend to be repeated and amplified by those who pass the message on (Sumner et al., 2014), and parents share recommendations in neighborhood groups. An overstated headline would spread.

Recommendation

Use Headline A as the lead headline. Its specificity is what makes it work, so the campaign should rotate versions naming other common problems, such as coughs, cuts and rashes, to keep it fresh. Retire Headline B for paid media; it may serve as a secondary line on the website, where context explains it. Drop Headline C entirely.

Every headline will sit above the short emergency warning list cleared in earlier work. Testing showed that parents who saw the warning list after Headline A correctly said they would take a child with breathing difficulty to the emergency department. Without it, three were unsure.

What the Agency Should Change

Beyond the headline choice, testing suggests three changes to the creative. First, the hours should sit directly under the headline, because six parents who saw Headline A asked whether the site was open at that moment. Second, images should show a clinician examining a calm child rather than a crying one; parents said a crying child made the site look like a place for serious problems. Third, the call to action should be "check the wait and save a spot," which parents understood, rather than "get care now," which three parents read as an emergency line.

Limits

Twenty-four parents from practices and a newsletter may be more engaged than the average parent. Testing on a phone in a quiet room with recorded crying approximates, but does not match, a real evening. Coding open answers involves judgment. Results apply to these three headlines, not to the full creative.

Conclusion

Parents understood the headline that named specific problems and misunderstood the one that compared the site with the emergency room. Message testing measured not only what parents liked but what they believed was promised, and that second measure decided the result. Headline A leads, Headline B moves to the website and Headline C is dropped because nearly half the parents read it as a promise of emergency care.

References

Federal Trade Commission. (2022). Health products compliance guidance. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/health-products-compliance-guidance

Kreuter, M. W., & Wray, R. J. (2003). Tailored and targeted health communication: Strategies for enhancing information relevance. American Journal of Health Behavior, 27(Suppl 3), S227-S232. https://doi.org/10.5993/AJHB.27.1.s3.6

Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Boivin, J., Williams, A., Venetis, C. A., Davies, A., Ogden, J., Whelan, L., Hughes, B., Dalton, B., Boy, F., & Chambers, C. D. (2014). The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: Retrospective observational study. BMJ, 349, g7015. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7015