Social Marketing: Developing a Tailored Message for a Physical Activity Program

Objective: To apply social marketing principles to identify message components for development of a campaign, to recruit participants, and/or to tailor a physical activity program to blue-collar employees. Method: An author-developed, 74-item questionnaire with established validity and reliability was administered to a census of 529 employees, and 468 participants responded (response rate = 88.5%). Results: Descriptive and multivariate statistics were applied to identify significant social marketing variables to compose the “marketing mix” and demographic variables to identify distinct segments of the sample. Conclusions: Different variables that compose the marketing mix should be emphasized to target specific segments and design appropriately appealing messages.