Step 1: Analyze Information Gaps

Example

Consider two, 35-year-old Hispanic females. Both have similar educational backgrounds and income levels. Both are married and have young children. One has a supportive husband who encourages her to go on walks with her friends. She enjoys eating healthy and cooking meals for her family. The other enjoys watching TV, going to see movies, and working on the computer. Her husband is not supportive of an active lifestyle. She is busy and does not enjoy cooking, so the family will often go out for fast food.

It is impossible to tell from demographic characteristics alone anything about the individuals' behavior, attitudes, or interests.

Adapted from Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change by Michael Siegel and Lynne Doner, p. 266

II: Target Audience

Ways to Segment
The key to audience segmentation is to divide your audience by meaningful factors that are relevant to the adoption of the desired behavior. What separates the people who do the desired behavior from those who don't?

Many public health professionals tend to segment audiences based on disease burden or risk, or by using demographic characteristics. Yet, these characteristics may not be the most important factors when it comes to behavior change, even though those data are usually easiest to find. People who fall into the same demographic category can be very different from one another with regards to nutrition and physical activity behaviors.