“Effective communication requires two or more people to have a topic of mutual interest, a mutual desire, intent or need to communicate about the topic, the opportunity to communicate and the means of communicating” (O'Toole, 2016). Senders of
messages are those who express information based on their thoughts, agenda, feelings or emotions at a given time while receivers of messages are those who constitute the audience and receive the information (O'Toole, 2016). Viewing communication in this perspective reveals that there are factors that are unique to the sender, those that are
Consumer's culture • Regional, ethnic and religious influences • Social class influences • Age, gender and
household influences • Social influences • Psychographics : values, personality and lifestyles The Psychological Core • Motivation, Ability and opprtunity • Exposure, attention and perception • Knowing and understanding • Attitude Formation • Memory and retrieval Decision Making Process • Problem recognition and information seearch • Judgement and decision making • Post-decision processes Consumer Behaviour Outcomes • Symbolic Consumer behaviour • Adoption of, Resistance to and Diffusion of Innovations
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unique to the receiver and those that are external to the sender and receiver. Examples of these factors are as follows;
Unique to the sender – Emphasis on a particular word (Crystal, 2007).
Unique to the receiver – Knowledge and associated levels of understanding (Honeycutt and Milliken, 2012), age (O'Toole, 2016), cultural/language background (Fageeh, 2011), individual disorder and individual interpretation according to their thoughts, ideas, needs and emotions at that given time (O'Toole, 2016).
External to the sender and receiver – Context of the situation and environment (Nunan, 2012) or background and experiences (Purtilo et al., 2014).
Within the public health domain, health communication has emerged for achieving public health objectives such as persuading and motivating people to adopt behavioural changes (Bernhardt, 2004). Hinyard and Kreuter (2007) have argued that health communication researchers increasingly utilise narrative forms of communication such as story-telling, and testimonials to help achieve the same objectives. According to Hinyard and Kreuter (2007), “A narrative is any cohesive and coherent story with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end that provides information about scene, characters, and conflict; raises unanswered questions or unresolved conflict; and provides resolution.” Narrative communication involves the use of different types of
stories to convey information to a receiver or to receive information from a source. These stories could be official stories constructed to tell a mild version of events; invented stories that are fictional; firsthand experiential stories; second-hand stories of others that are retold, and culturally common stories that are generalized and pervasive in a cultural environment as identified by Schank and Berman (2003).
It has been argued that narrative communication has the following advantages (Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007): (a) Narratives help overcome resistance to a message by reducing counter-arguing; (b) narratives facilitate observational learning; and (c) identification with characters in a narrative influences perceptions of group and/or personal susceptibility as well as social norms. Narrative processing is based on the transportation-imagery model and the extended Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) model. According to the transportation-imagery model, narrative persuasion occurs because the receiver is “transported” into the narrative world thereby causing them to
absorb the story to the extent that they are less likely to counter-argue because the story is more like an actual experience (Green, 2004, Van Laer et al., 2013, Green and Brock, 2002). On the other hand, the extended ELM model states that a person’s processing goals establish the type of processing that will take place; and that determinants of processing intensity, such as a person’s motivation, are responsible for the degree of involvement within each type of processing (Slater, 2002). This means that, for an individual to engage with a narrative message the narrative must serve the needs and the goals of the receiver. Both models thus agree that inhibition of counter-arguing, identification with story characters, and transportation or engagement with the narrative increase the persuasiveness of the narrative (Green and Brock, 2002, Slater, 2002).
Due to the importance of information (Kim and Lennon, 2000), which consumers acquire from different sources, whether appropriate or not, government authorities and businesses have continuously tried to change consumer attitudes by employing different communication models but more specifically narratives in order to achieve their intended purpose. The basic components of communication entails the source, the message and the medium of communication which could be via television, radio, magazines, billboards, personal contacts and others (Solomon et al., 2009).
The media has however evolved, as the proponents of uses and gratifications theory
have stressed that the mass media contend with other sources in other to fulfil consumer needs such as distraction, entertainment and information (O'Donohoe, 1994, Stafford et al., 2004). Based on this, cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), iPods, tablets, blogs such as m-blogging, video blogging, podcasting, RSS (really simple syndication) and flogs (fake blogs) have become tools which businesses use to promote their products (Solomon et al., 2009). Narratives may be communicated through a wide range of media as listed above but it has been argued that different media affect both the way narratives are processed and their effectiveness (Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007). For example; Pfau et al. (2000) have shown that visual media emphasise the importance of source attributes. This suggests that character identification might be facilitated in a video-based narrative. Character identification is one of the key elements of the transportation imagery theory.
According to Solomon et al. (2009) the source of a message has the potential to influence the acceptance or rejection of a message. An important characteristic of the source of a message has to do with credibility which is known as the perceived expertise,
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objectivity or trustworthiness of a source. The source credibility has been heavily researched in the literature for over five decades under the disciplines of consumer behaviour and social psychology (Pornpitakpan, 2004). It is widely believed that a source with high credibility induces more persuasion towards a cause than a source with low credibility (Hovland and Weiss, 1951, Horai et al., 1974, Johnson and Izzett, 1969, Schulman and Worrall, 1970, Maddux and Rogers, 1980, Lirtzman and Shuv-Ami, 1986).
In relation to the receiver, it has been argued that attributes of the intended audience may influence the effect of narrative communication (Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007). For instance, research within the narrative transportation domain has revealed that a person’s ability to create vivid mental images and his or her propensity for absorption can facilitate narrative persuasion (Green and Brock, 2002, Green, 2004). In the same vein, culture might affect the impact of narrative communication as every culture contains several dominant stories that are understood by those within the culture; and it is drawn upon to make meaning out of different situations under different circumstances (Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007).
The message and its characteristics have the potential to influence consumer attitudes as the “what” of the message and “how” the message is conveyed are powerful variables
(Solomon et al., 2009). The debate here has largely concerned the textual, verbal and visual component of advertisements – information modalities. According to Solomon et al. (2009) it is believed that a picture can deliver a big impact in an economic manner but it is not always effective when communicating factual information. On the other hand, it has been argued that verbal messages are more appropriate for high-involvement situations but is more difficult to process and typically erodes easily in memory hence it requires more frequent exposures in order to achieve the intended purpose. Therefore, it is sometimes more effective to accompany visual elements with the verbal ones (Hirschman and Solomon, 1984). Characteristics of the visual and verbal elements include; vividness (Rossiter and Percy, 1980, Kisielius and Sternthal, 1986, Keller and Block, 1997), repetition (Zajonc, 1968, D'Souza and Rao, 1995, Belch, 1982, Bornstein, 1989), argument construction (Golden and Alpert, 1987, Sawyer, 1973) and drawing conclusions (Kardes, 1988).
In order to investigate the influence of product presentation format (visual or verbal) on consumer shopping in an online store, the results of the study conducted by Kim and Lennon (2008) showed that only verbal information had a significant effect on purchase intention, though visual information was also important. According to the study on visual merchandising cues (VMD) by Ha and Lennon (2010), the results indicate that VMD cues increase consumer satisfaction, purchase intention, and approach behaviour. It is worthy of note here that visual merchandising can be referred to as the strategic presentation of a company and its products in order to attract consumers and facilitate purchasing via merchandise presentation, store design, mannequins, props and materials, lighting, graphics, and signage (Diamond and Diamond, 2008). Internet shopping researchers have recently focused on VMD due to the belief that more attractive and pleasurable website has the potential to influence the behavioural intention of a consumer (Szymanski and Hise, 2000, Wu et al., 2008, Ha and Lennon, 2010).
Within the same discourse, a study by Blanco et al. (2010) reveals that a schematic display of textual information improves perceptions of information quality. Hence, the combination of a picture and textual information, helps users in remembering more information easily especially when the information appears schematically. However, the absence of a product picture causes users to expend more resources in processing paragraph information but makes them recall more information easily; thus aligning with the results of the study by Kim and Lennon (2008).
In another study by Lin et al. (2012), while investigating the influence of visual information on consumers’ perception of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) message quality, credibility, product interest, and purchase intention via the use of blogs, the results indicate that the respondents rated eWOM articles with visual information significantly higher in perceived message quality, credibility, consumers’ product interest and purchase intention than identical articles without visual information. eWOM communication occurs via the use of web-based technologies in order to post text reviews and product pictures online while seeking product recommendations (Lin et al., 2012).
Though numerous research have been conducted within the human and computer interaction (HCI) sub-discipline on the impact of diverse information modalities on consumer knowledge, yet it is still unclear how the acquired knowledge can be translated
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to corresponding behaviour. In addition, while there are supporting and contradicting arguments within the literature, there is one area where there seems to be an agreement; the importance of information presentation. Hence, it is much clearer that the way information is presented to consumers can influence consumers’ reaction. As the studies highlighted above were largely conducted within the information systems (IS) discipline but without reference to the safe food management context defined in this study, it is imperative to consider food-related studies and gaps that exist in the literature within this discourse.