Football Fandom as a Platform for Digital Health Promotion and Behaviour Change: A Mobile App Case Study

Positive and Negative Impacts of Gamification on the Fitness Industry

Gamification features to motivate individuals to exercise have become a trend in the fitness sector that is gaining popularity. It is based on the idea that adding fun and competitive components to workout routines will inspire people to achieve their fitness objectives and maintain a healthy lifestyle. This research study attempts to analyze the literature that explores this concept of gamification in detail, and create a picture of how its implementation has changed fitness and healthy habits. This research incorporated the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach as its research methodology. Search strategy used a set of inclusion-exclusion criteria that helped us examine through hundreds of articles identified in the Web of Science and SCOPUS databases. After exclusive and inclusion criteria, 48 articles were selected to be reviewed in detail. Results have indicated that gamification strategy is a supporting factor to overcome the difficulties of executing exercises. Also, to improve the willingness towards fitness regimens.

How to Use the Six-Step Digital Ethnography Framework to Develop Buyer Personas: The Case of Fan Fit

BACKGROUND

One of the key features of digital marketing is customer centricity, which can be applied to the domain of health. This is expressed through the ability to target specific customer segments with relevant content using appropriate channels and having data to track and understand each interaction. In order to do this, marketers create buyer personas based on a wide spectrum of quantitative and qualitative data. Digital ethnography is another established method for studying web-based communities. However, for practitioners, the complexity, rigor, and time associated with ethnographical work are sometimes out of reach.

OBJECTIVE

This paper responds to the gaps in the practically focused method of using social media for digital ethnography to develop buyer personas. This paper aims to demonstrate how digital ethnography can be used as a way to create and refine buyer personas.

METHODS

Using a case study of the Fan Fit smartphone app, which aimed to increase physical activity, a digital ethnography was applied to create a better understanding of customers and to create and refine buyer personas.

RESULTS

We propose two buyer personas, and we develop a 6-step digital ethnography framework designed for the development of buyer personas.

CONCLUSIONS

The key contribution of this work is the proposal of a 6-step digital ethnography framework designed for the development of buyer personas. We highlight that the 6-step digital ethnography could be a robust tool for practitioners and academicians to analyze digital communications for the process of creating and updating data-driven buyer personas to create deeper insights into digital and health marketing efforts.

Factors Influencing Use of Fitness Apps by Adults under Influence of COVID-19

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, many countries imposed restrictions and quarantines on the population, which led to a decrease in people's physical activity (PA) and severely damaged their mental health. As a result, people engaged in fitness activities with the help of fitness apps, which improved their resistance to the virus and reduced the occurrence of psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression. However, the churn rate of fitness apps is high. As such, our purpose in this study was to analyze the factors that influence the use of fitness apps by adults aged 18-65 years in the context of COVID-19, with the aim of contributing to the analysis of mobile fitness user behavior and related product design practices. We constructed a decision target program model using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and we analyzed and inductively screened 11 evaluation indicators, which we combined with an indicator design questionnaire. We distributed 420 questionnaires; of the respondents, 347 knew about or used fitness apps. Among these 347, we recovered 310 valid questionnaires after removing invalid questionnaires with a short completion time, for an effective questionnaire recovery rate of 89.33%. We used the AHP and entropy method to calculate and evaluate the weight coefficient of each influencing factor and to determine an influencing factor index. Our conclusions were as follows: first, the effect of perceived usefulness on the use of fitness apps by the study groups was the most notable. Second, personal motivation and perceived ease of use considerably influenced the adult group's willingness to use fitness apps. Finally, the perceived cost had relatively little effect on the use of fitness apps by adults, and the study group was much more concerned with the privacy cost than the expense cost.