Increasing Students’ Physical Activity in Function of Social Sustainability: Recommendations from a Social Marketing Perspective

Social Marketing in Promoting Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle among Student Population

Although there are some differences in healthy lifestyle measurement, physical activity is an indispensable factor within that construct. By increasing the level of physical activity of the population, the contribution to social sustainability is provided. Social marketing can be considered as a manner to promote behavior change (including increase in physical activity level). It uses commercial marketing tools in delivering social goods. In that context can be explained previous uses of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) in social marketing researches aiming at increasing the level of physical activity of the population. In this paper, the modified TPB model, extended with self-identity and motivation variable, is implemented within the student population of the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2019. The results show that intention to do regular physical activity in the week after the research was directly influenced by behavioral and normative beliefs and self-identity. It was influenced indirectly by students’ motivation. The motivation, however, directly affects students’ behavioral, normative and control beliefs. Nevertheless, the results differ among genders; although positive at both genders, the effects of normative beliefs and motivation on intention were significant only in female students (0.123 and 0.243, respectively). The authors also provide social marketing implications, i.e., potential activities within social marketing that could be performed in order to encourage students to be more physically active. In addition to belonging to relatively scarce similar researches in domestic context, the wider contribution of this paper can be identified from a methodological aspect, treating the behavioral, normative and control beliefs as formative constructs.