If you feed them, will they come? The use of social marketing to increase interest in attending a college alcohol program.

The authors used social marketing to design and test advertisement components aimed at increasing students' interest in attending an alcohol program focused on reaching students who drink heavily, although the authors offered no such program. Participants were undergraduate students in introductory psychology courses (N = 551). Questionnaires included measures assessing demographic information, alcohol use and negative consequences, and interest in attending an alcohol program in response to exposure to 1 of 12 systematically varied advertisements. The authors found that approximately 20% of participants across all ad types indicated some level of interest in attending the alcohol program. Students who use alcohol reported more interest in attending when an informational message was used. Of the participants offered food, 41.9% indicated the food offered in the advertisement impacted their interest in attending. Results suggest market segmentation plays a role in developing effective advertisements to recruit different groups of students based on their reported drinking behavior.