The effectiveness of gendered wording in health promotion leaflet - exploratory experiment in four English-speaking countries: the UK, USA, Ireland and Canada.

This article reports results from a cross-national exploratory experiment in which we examined the effectiveness of gendered wording and endorser’s gender in a leaflet promoting walking across four English-speaking countries: the UK, USA, Ireland, and Canada. Data were collected from 1072 students via an online questionnaire in the four countries to ensure cross-cultural data equivalence. Results demonstrated that respondents evaluated the leaflets in similar ways regardless of the country with few exceptions, suggesting that gendered content may be an effective creative strategy to use in health promotion across the studied English-speaking countries. Masculine males in the UK were the only group who evaluated communal wording in terms of attitude towards ad and behavioural intention negatively. As a result, the study presents applied suggestions and implications for future message structure within both social and commercial marketing related to gender content in social marketing advertisements.