The VERB^™ Campaign's Strategy for Reaching African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian Children and Parents

The VERB™ campaign promoted physical activity to U.S. children aged 9-13 years (tweens) by surrounding them with appealing messages that were associated with the VERB brand and tag line It's what you do! To maximize the impact of the campaign, VERB had a two-level strategy for its marketing. One level was designed to reach a general audience of tweens (i.e., most tweens who use mainstream media). The second level was designed specifically to reach four racial or ethnic audiences: African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians as an augmentation to the first level. This article focuses on VERB's market segmentation strategy and reports how messages for the general audience were adapted to reach specific racial or ethnic segments of the U.S. population. Findings are reported from qualitative studies conducted with tweens and the parents of tweens from these ethnic groups, and the marketing strategies used to reach each ethnic group and the results of evaluations of those strategies are also described.