The Nigerian Perspective of Social Marketing Campaigns: A Study of Ebonyi State Action Committee on Aids (EBOSACA)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of broadcast media campaigns/programmes on behavioural change in the Ebonyi State of Nigeria. The study is based mainly on primary data collected through structured interview and a scientifically developed questionnaire administered to a randomly generated sample of 50 respondents. Exploratory factor analysis in the form of principal component analysis, Cronbach alpha and correlation were respectively employed to assess scale simplification and summarization, scale internal consistency and relationship among variables. Result indicates that even as broadcast media campaigns and information is likely to influence behavioural change of Ebonyians, this impact is not traceable to the broadcast media campaigns/programmes of the EBOSACA. This paper and its finding was identified as indeed fundamental as previous researchers have conducted less research on the impact of broadcast media campaigns/programmes on the variables explored in this research and with evidence of lack of substantive empirical study on the subject within Non-western developing economy like Nigeria. The results of this study show that with proper message timing and frequency, broadcast media campaigns/programmes is likely to influence people’s social life just as appropriate information can equally alter people’s behaviour or attitude. Owing to the crippling impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, evolving strategies to stem the epidemic becomes unavoidably important and managers and directors of social/behavioural change courses should be rethinking their tactics in this regard.

Keywords: Social marketing, Broadcast media campaigns/programmes, EBOSACA, HIV/AIDS, Information,    Behavioural change