Beyond Body Weight: Design and Validation of Psycho-Behavioural Living and Eating for Health Segments (LEHS) Profiles for Social Marketing

Abstract

Obesity, sedentary behaviour, and poor dietary habits amongst young adults are growing concerns, with this age group being in a worse state of health and nutrition than adolescents and adults. This paper presents the procedures for establishing a new instrument for defining behaviours in relation to healthy lifestyle and food choices amongst young adults (Living and Eating for Health Segments: LEHS). The aim of this paper is to outline the instrument design protocol for external validation and to permit replication in other studies. The instrument design process used a multi-step social marketing instrument design method. This approach has previously been used in designing valid and reliable measures in marketing and consumer research, including social marketing. The protocol established six psycho-behavioural LEHS profiles for young adults. These profiles are: Lifestyle Mavens (15.4%), Aspirational Healthy Eaters (27.5%), Balanced-all Rounders (21.4%), Health Conscious (21.1%), Contemplating Another Day (11.2%), and Blissfully Unconcerned (3.4%). Each of these profiles provided insights into psycho-behavioural characteristics that can be used in designing apposite social media social marketing campaigns.

Psycho-Behavioural Segmentation in Food and Nutrition: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature

“…By dividing populations into smaller subgroups based on similarities, each group or segment can be targeted with a more customised message and media strategy designed to increase the effectiveness of interventions [9]. Broadly, there are a number of bases for segmentation including the use of psychographic, demographic, geographic, and behavioural factors (see Supplementary File S1) [11,15].…”

“…Psychographic segmentation explores the personality traits, beliefs, values, interests and lifestyles to understand motives of actions and behaviours-i.e., the 'why' and 'what' as opposed to the 'who' and 'where' provided by demographic and geographic segmentation [15,20]. Behavioural segmentation includes the frequency and quantity of behaviours such as purchasing, usage and consumption of certain foods [11,15]. Psychographic and behavioural variables can be employed as a primary basis for segmentation analysis to provide a more explanatory and predictive approach [18].…”

“…Delivering insights into what people think and understand and what motivates behaviours offers the potential to improve prediction of behaviours in addition to extending insights that can be used during program planning and design. Previous studies suggest combining segmentation variables (demographics, psychographics, geographic and behavioural variables) to provide a meaningful profile of the population [15,18].…”

“…Similarly, geographic segmentation allows health promoters to understand where people are located and to apply efforts to the right locations [18] and can also be done in advance (a-priori). On the other hand, psychographic segmentation enables the health promoter to connect more closely with the audience by creating communications that are specific to their belief structures [15]. However, these variables are not easily ascertained in advance of campaign design and therefore are often evaluated in a two-step or hybrid system.…”

“…However, these variables are not easily ascertained in advance of campaign design and therefore are often evaluated in a two-step or hybrid system. Firstly, deciding a qualitative description of segments, and secondly after data collection, using post-hoc analysis to evaluate and/or quantify the segments [15]. Similarly, segmenting using behavioural variables requires prior understanding of behaviours, hence is either done as a single qualitative stage or a two-stage hybrid process of segmentation.…”