Marketing psychological services: Using client problem and solution perceptions to design help offering promotional appeals

This article presents a model for segmenting potential clients for behaviorally related services such as psychotherapy, related mental health services, and medical conditions requiring significant behavioral action and compliance such as hypertension and diabetes. The model groups potential clients and caregivers as having beliefs about whether clients are responsible for their problems and responsible for their problem's solutions. Different clients' beliefs are shown to result in different social marketing promotional strategies whose goal is to foster timely and appropriate help seeking. The model is used to show the potential interactions between problem and solution perceptions and the different appeal strategies of problem or solution focus; fear, the credentials of the caregivers; and the use of modeling, shaping, and behaviorally explicit directions. Different appeals' ability to enhance or thwart help seeking is discussed. Implications for future research are given. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.