Flyers and Their Effectiveness

Recently, my softball team has been collaborating with the Island Harvest organization to help families out for the holidays. Today, I went to the Island Harvest Nassau location and gathered event materials for this Saturday, where I met a nice old man. We got to talking about my team, and he said, "You should have no problem getting people to accept and read those flyers; your team is full of a bunch of cute little ladies!" That got me thinking, is that how messages are passed to the masses? If my team wasn't a bunch of "cute little ladies," could we be as effective in distributing the organization's message to the shoppers at different grocery stores?

Then, this lead me to think about the Social Cognitive Theory. If certain celebrities and well known faces claim to be active in this organization or a supporter of that fund, will we, as the audience, truly imitate and become involved in what they're promoting? Obviously, that's the aim of the organizations: hiring celebrities to get their fans to buy in. I wonder how effective this is, which leads me to think about the main reason we got involved with Island Harvest. As I've previously mentioned, my friends and I are fans of "Biggest Loser." On one episode, the contestants got to work with an organization called Feeding America, and I subsequently searched for a similar organization on Long Island for us to participate in. So, I guess the Social Cognitive Theory is accurate. I saw people I have parasocial relationships with doing something, and I quickly found out how I could do the same thing. Wow, I only realized that as I was writing this blog. I suppose I'm more in line with these theories than I had originally thought. And, as someone who is now somewhat conscious of these theories, I have to wonder how affected those people are who have never heard of these theories.