Social marketing: Developing a tailored message for a physical activity program

Objective: To apply social marketing principles to identify message compone nts for development of a campaign, to recruit participants, and/or to tailo r a physical activity program to blue-collar employees. Method: An author-d eveloped, 74-item questionnaire with established validity and reliability w as administered to a census of 529 employees, and 468 participants responde d (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 segment s of the sample. Conclusions: Different variables that compose the marketin g mix should be emphasized to target specific segments and design appropria tely appealing messages.