The brief
Learn what marketing messages and approaches will work for encouraging cancer survivors aged over 50 to start an activity and stay active.
This to include the answers to the following questions
- What are the main barriers to becoming more active that they face? (so we can help overcome these)
- Did the activities they want to do change because they had cancer?
- What are the key benefits of physical activity cancer survivors will respond to?
- How can this insight be turned into marketing materials which get cancer survivors to do more activity?
Our response to the brief
After years of using focus groups to test marketing approaches for physical activity we knew that focus groups alone would not give us accurate results. This is because:
- People become defensive about not doing activity following years of hectoring messages from government
- Most people believe that they do enough activity already
People then explain that they don’t have enough time or money, even when you know that time and money are not the main problems.
There was already a huge amount of research and experimentation into marketing physical activity to over 50s and also into marketing wider behaviour change to cancer survivors. There were even some existing projects which were successfully marketing physical activity to cancer survivors over 50. We therefore took full advantage of this existing research and built on that.
We did the research in 5 stages, with real world experiments involved. This was similar to research work that we organised for the 19 Sport England sporting segments, but will built on that to be even more robust.
- Stage 1 – secondary research into existing projects and findings
- Stage 2 – create marketing materials based on this insight
- Stage 3 – primary research into marketing messages and marketing materials
- Stage 4 – market testing of marketing materials
- Stage 5 – write up results and provide training in how to use them
Results
So far we’ve completed stages 1-3, and we’ve been able to develop some fantastic insights. We have so far been able to tell Macmillan:
- What the most effective messages are, and which ones you shouldn’t use at all
- Which of the colours from their brand guidelines are most effective when promoting activity
- What images work best on their marketing materials
- What systems they should help councils and other local organisations to use when supporting cancer survivors in getting active
Testimonial
“A fantastic job on developing insight for us.”
Jo Foster
Physical Activity Manager, Macmillan Cancer Support
