Evaluating the truth^®Brand

Abstract

The American Legacy Foundation developed the truth campaign, an aspirational antismoking brand for adolescents. This study tested whether a multidimensional scale, brand equity in truth, mediates the relationship between campaign exposure and youth smoking. We collected brand equity responses from 2,306 youth on a nationally representative telephone survey. Factor analysis indicates that the scale has excellent psychometric properties and effectively measures brand equity. We developed a structural equation model to test the mediation hypothesis. Results show that brand equity mediates the relationship between truth and smoking. Analyses of potential cofounders show this relationship is robust. Behavioral branding (brands about a behavior or a lifestyle) is an important public health strategy.

Translating the Link Between Social Identity and Health Behavior Into Effective Health Communication Strategies: An Experimental Application Using Antismoking Advertisements

“…Evans, Price and Blahut (2005) found that the effects of the truth® campaign (which was designed to have a high sensation value: Farrelly, Niederdeppe & Yarsevich, 2003) were modestly moderated by sensation seeking. Other work indicates that targeting youth based on sensation seeking (e.g.…”

Evaluation of Bar and Nightclub Intervention to Decrease Young Adult Smoking in New Mexico

“…Specifically, Social Branding uses “social brands” targeted to specific peer crowds at high risk for unhealthy behaviors to associate healthy behaviors with peer crowd values. Although most branded social marketing efforts create brands to promote health behaviors to general audiences, such as “tweens” (VERB) [17] or “teens open to smoking” (truth) [17,18], a critical component of Social Branding is that a social brand is precisely targeted to a high-risk peer crowd by specifically aligning with the peer crowd's interests to establish cultural authenticity and brand equity. Then, the social brand uses its status within the peer crowd to associate certain values unique to that peer crowd with a positive health behavior through the use of interactive experiences at events, culturally relevant influencers, and interactive digital media.…”

Cost and Threshold Analysis of the FinishIt Campaign to Prevent Youth Smoking in the United States

“…As a result, Truth Initiative (formerly the American Legacy Foundation) was formed and the non-profit launched truth ® , a national mass-media smoking prevention campaign primarily targeted at a youth audience aged 12–17 in the early 2000s. Research has since demonstrated that the campaign changed youths’ beliefs about and attitudes toward tobacco [1,2,3,4,5], prevented more than 450,000 youth from smoking over four years [4], and was cost-saving [6]. …”