Using multiple methods to identify theme lines for media marketing campaigns to promote Medicare information sources

– The purpose of this study is to use multiple consumer research methods to examine perceptions of theme lines for media campaigns to promote awareness of Medicare information sources., – Participants were senior Medicare beneficiaries, their informal family caregivers, and coming‐of‐agers who will shortly be eligible for Medicare. To permit comparisons among methods, both qualitative focus groups data and quantitative Q‐sort data were collected, and the Q‐sort data were analyzed using both a tailored software package and a major software package., – The two most preferred lines were “answers to your health care questions” and “helping you help yourself”. Relative preference for those two lines varied across five identified information audience groups with different age and income profiles., – Future investigations to identify theme lines for various communication information audiences within this population should also examine disabled non‐senior Medicare beneficiaries, that is, those eligible due to disability rather than age. More broadly, future research should explore the use of Q‐sort data to conduct similar analyses with other populations and for other sorts of marketing communication campaigns., – The major practical implication is the demonstration of the collection and analysis of Q‐sort data, using a major software package, to identify theme lines to target different information audiences for advertising and marketing communication campaigns., – This study demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of using Q‐sort methodology to identify theme lines and of analyzing the data using a major software package.