Co-Designing Active Workplace Social Marketing Campaign: Barriers and Motivators to Sit Less and Stand Up: An Abstract

Abstract

Sedentary behaviour is a serious issue which causes numerous health issues (Ekelund et al., 2016). In Australia, 80% of sedentary behaviour occurs in the workplace (Mainsbridge et al., 2016) with an average of 7 h per day (De Cocker et al., 2015). Breaking up sedentary time every 30 min is recommended to minimise the health damage (Ekelund et al., 2016). Thus, an effective workplace campaign to reduce sitting and increase physical activity (PA) is urgently required. Social marketing is an effective approach to change behaviours such as sedentary behaviours by using commercial marketing techniques (Lee & Kotler, 2013). However, the use of theory and consumer insight (French, 2010; Truong, 2014) is lacking in social marketing, and there is limited empirical research on sedentary behaviour reduction campaigns (Gourrlan et al., 2016). This paper attempts to fill these gaps by employing a codesign method underpinned by exchange theory. The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers and motivators to change sedentary behaviour which may then be used to develop an exchange offering to increase physical activity in the workplace.

Two codesign sessions were held with 13 office workers in Brisbane. This paper focuses on two activities held during the session: (1) sentence completion and (2) campaign development. Guided by exchange theory, participants were asked to write down the first things came in mind when they saw the keywords/incomplete sentences. Groups were then asked to create a campaign which they would participate in. All sentence completion responses were coded into key themes. First, the results of sentence completion identified ‘work’ as the dominant barrier, whereas the most common motivators were ‘needs’, ‘lunch/break’ and ‘communication’. This indicates that office workers are likely to move when they ‘need’ to. However, it also revealed that office workers are motivated to stand up at break time or to engage in social interaction. Second, the four codesigned campaigns reflected consumers’ insight into reducing sedentary behaviour. Results revealed office workers prefer enjoyable activities which also provide tangible rewards or increased socialisation in their work environment. Furthermore, scheduling appropriate time into the work schedule is suggested to recondition workers’ sedentary habits. This study demonstrates that a theoretically guided, innovative formative research method can provide consumer insight to inform planning and development of a social marketing programme.