“Framing” health related messages either by focusing on the loss of not engaging in a specific behaviour or by focusing on the gain by engaging into a desired behaviour can have a massive outcome on how people perceive a given message - and more importantly how likely they are to actually act. This effect can be astonishingly large: For example, Mann, Sherman & Updegraff showed that by matching the frame of the message to the motivations of the recipient, the communications were up to 50% more effective in changing behavior - impressive to say the least!
In a new, exploratory research project which we are about to start at Middlesex University, we will go a little further and explore the link between culture and message framing - an area which has not been explored a lot as yet. Starting next week, we will start an initial survey comparing individualistic and collectivistic countries and a number of differently framed messages and appeals - thus linking current advertising research and cross-cultural research with health message framing research. Very exciting! Stay tuned for the findings 
!
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This sounds really interesting. But I have a question: The Mann et al study showed the effectiveness of matching the frame of the message to individual motivations. But will this translate easily into a cultural context? Are cultures homogeneous enough these days to allow such an analysis? I’d be interested to see how you approach this!
Your point is a good one - actually I more or less simply tried to say how large the effect of framing could be (rather than talk about the link between motivation and [cultural] values etc…). A lot has been written on how optimising values along cultural lines leads to better consumer response from commercial marketing research ( see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=658221&rec=1&srcabs=499104 ) - but not so much about the validity in social marketing coms. But of course, cultures (or more to the point the people that make up a culture) are never homogenous - and in an ideal world, one could check the individual values and then optimise coms accordingly…