Unintended Consequences of a Segmentation Strategy: Exploring Constraint Recognition Among Black Women Targeted in HIV/AIDS Campaigns

Targeted health communication campaigns have attempted to educate and engage publics, yet scholars and practitioners continue to refine best practices for predicting the outcomes of these efforts. After more than 30 years of messaging aimed at HIV/AIDS education in America, contraction rates among Black women continue to climb. Practitioners are challenged to better understand factors impacting constraint recognition among Black women targeted by HIV/AIDS messaging. The situational theory of publics provided a framework for segmenting and analyzing constraint recognition among Black American women participating in this study. Findings indicate that constraint recognition, when linked to salient cultural identity in the minds of targeted publics, decreases message processing and increases fear of social stigma among targeted publics. The current study contributes to the expanding body of public relations literature on health and adds to the exploration of cultural identity as an antecedent variable in public relations’ situational theory, which Sha (1999) had identified as an area for further study. Results from this study suggested a process for evaluating and avoiding the consequences of connecting constraints with identity in health campaigns that include targeting strategies and reinforced the importance of intersectionality when seeking to understand traditionally marginalized publics’ identities