eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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PURPOSE OF THE STUDY Physical inactivity has been pinpointed as the biggest public health problem of the 21st century for the welfare states. To overcome this issue, barriers to exercise -research has proven particularly important as it has been suggested that the perceived barriers may be the single most important predictor of consumers’ health-related behaviors. Hence, the purpose of this study is to build consumer segments based on perceived barriers in order to enable commercial exercise and fitness service providers to better target these consumers with different marketing interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating these barriers. Therefore, the further objective of this study is to examine whether the interventions impact the perceived level of the barriers, and whether there are any emerging patterns of certain intervention types having greater impact on certain barriers. METHODOLOGY The present study applied a pre-test-post-test design and was organized in cooperation with a local gym. An initial web-based survey gathered 362 responses. The non-exercisers identified in preliminary survey were subjected to interventions with three types of appeals (rational, emotional and transformational) and were asked to refill the questionnaire. Three multivariate data-analysis techniques were applied to address the research questions. Factor analysis was used to identify exercise barriers underlying dimension, cluster analysis was conducted to discover exercise profiles based on the factor solution and repeated measures were applied to see whether barrier levels were affected. FINDINGS Unique profiles identified in the cluster analysis demonstrate that exercise barriers can be used to efficiently segment consumers for marketing purposes. Repeated measures show significant mitigations, and increases, in several barriers, the relevance of which was further interpreted from the perspective of both a commercial exercise and fitness service provider and public policy. Findings showed that cognitive and affective marketing appeals were most effective, whereas behavioral intervention was rather surprisingly least effective in mitigating barriers to exercise. KEYWORDS: Barriers to exercise, determinants of physical activity, interventions, persuasive appeals in marketing, multivariate analysis