The lessons that health and fitness social marketing could learn from the independent fitness instructor

Participating in physical activity is a current and topical subject in the media today and a recent study suggests that inactivity is more likely to kill individuals than obesity. There has been a considerable increase in... [ view full abstract ]

Participating in physical activity is a current and topical subject in the media today and a recent study suggests that inactivity is more likely to kill individuals than obesity. There has been a considerable increase in social marketing campaigns like Change 4 Life to encourage the general public in the UK to participate in physical activity, however, such campaigns have little effect on participation levels among key target groups who are least likely to participate, women and lower socio-economic groups. Nonetheless, there are women and individuals from lower socio-economic groups that do participate and research identified that this participation takes place in a non-traditional health and fitness setting run by independent fitness instructors. The aim of this paper is to explore what the independent fitness instructor is doing differently from publicly funded social marketing campaigns when promoting physical activity. The social media site Facebook was analysed and the pages for instructors, local leisure centres, social marketing campaign Change 4 Life and private health clubs were compared. Results suggest the Change 4 Life, leisure centres and private health club pages were transactional in their approach whereas the instructor pages were interactive and had a highly social approach.