Research With Latina and Black Women for an HIV Prevention Campaign

We present the process of developing a social marketing campaign to promote HIV testing with Black and Latina women living in neighborhoods with high rates of HIV. We developed partnerships with organizations serving women at high risk for contracting or transmitting HIV as well as with experts in prevention, marketing, and research. Focus groups with community organizations’ staff members helped create motivational messages. These data led us to focus on health promotion attitudes toward enhancing well-being rather than on fear-based messages about disease and risk behaviors. Additionally, we determined that to shape norms and self-efficacy, messenger images should be women that the focus audience would identify with as a model of their “best self”—attainable and positive. A series of messages were then pretested to Latina and Black women receiving services at the partner organizations. They confirmed that they did not want to read negative messages or see portraits of women representing their community ...