Communities leveraging the assets of a national social marketing campaign: Experiences with VERB^TM. It’s what you do!

The VERB. It’s what you do! social marketing campaign used mass media, school and community promotions, the Internet, and partnerships with national organizations and local communities to encourage children aged 9-13 years (tweens) to be physically active every day. The national presence of VERB through paid advertising on multiple media outlets facilitated the penetration of the campaign into communities where tweens could sample the product of physical activity through multiple school and community promotions, tours, and events. Some communities responded by using the VERB brand to develop their own programs for physical activity, giving the local community activities the cachet and cool factor associated with the images the tweens were seeing in the national marketing campaign. This chapter focuses on the community presence of VERB that developed from the national media platform and through the community-generated programs that leveraged the assets of the VERB brand to bring physical activity opportunities to tweens in their own communities.