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Community coalitions are an important part of the public milieu and subject to similar external pressures as other publicly funded organizations – including changes in required strategic orientation. Many US government agencies that fund efforts such as community-based social marketing initiatives have shifted their funding agenda from program development to policy development. The Florida Prevention Research Center at the University of South Florida (Tampa, Florida, USA) created community-based prevention marketing (CBPM) for policy development framework to teach community coalitions how to apply social marketing to policy development. This paper aims to explicate the framework’s theory of change.

The research question was: “How does implementing the CBPM for Policy Development framework improve coalition performance over time?” The authors implemented a case study design, with the “case” being a normative community coalition. The study adhered to a well-developed series of steps for system dynamics modeling.

Results from computer model simulations show that gains in community coalition performance depend on a coalition’s initial culture and initial efficiency, and that only the most efficient coalitions’ performance might improve from implementing the CBPM framework.

Practical implications for CBPM’s developers and users are discussed, namely, the importance of managing the early expectations of academic-community partnerships seeking to shift their orientation from downstream (e.g. program development) to upstream social marketing strategies (e.g. policy change).

This article aims to propose that increased guidance on the implementation of social marketing principles for sustainability issues can advance both implementation and empirical evaluation. The primary goal of this paper is to ignite further empirical investigation of social marketing for sustainability by first presenting benchmark criteria for one social marketing model – community-based social marketing (CBSM) – and second, applying this framework to the case study of musician Jack Johnson’s “All at Once” (AAO) campaign.

The research design is twofold. First, based on Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s CBSM model, a series of 21 benchmarks for assessing the key components of an effective CBSM initiative was developed. Second, this tool was applied to information gathered from Jack Johnson’s extensive outreach promoting AAO initiatives including reports, videos as well as interviews and in-person meetings with the Jack Johnson team.

Application of the benchmark criteria to the Jack Johnson case study showed that seven out of the 21 benchmarks were integrated into the AAO campaign; seven were partially integrated and seven were not integrated in the program’s design. In particular, the use of commitments, incentives, norms and social diffusion was clearly present as was a final evaluation of the full-scale implementation of the campaign.

The CBSM benchmarks are meant as a starting point to further assess and compare the effectiveness of CBSM initiatives. Further research should be done to explore how criteria should be weighted and which of the 21 principles need to be present in the design and implementation of an effective CBSM program.

This paper aims to investigate whether application of a community-based social marketing (CBSM) principle, namely, increasing the visibility of a target behaviour in the community, can change social norms surrounding the behaviour.

A repeated measures quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation’s Walk to School 2013 programme. The target population for the survey were caregivers of primary school children aged between 5-12 years old. The final sample size across the three online surveys administered was 102 respondents.

The results suggest that the programme increased caregivers’ perceptions that children in their community walked to and from school and that walking to and from school is socially acceptable.

The study contributes to addressing the recent call for research examining the relationship between CBSM principles and programme outcomes. Further, the results provide insight for enhancing the social norms approach, which has traditionally relied on changing social norms exclusively through media campaigns.

This study aims to explore the role of community health workers (promotoras) as a vehicle to identify and involve stakeholders in cleaning the environment in two community-based social marketing (CBSM) interventions.

This paper evaluates two CBSM interventions that used a promotora model to address city cleaning efforts; one in Puebla, Mexico and the other in San Luis, Arizona, USA. The qualitative methods included as follows: 25 in-depth and short interviews with managers, residents and promotoras and observational data on the sites with the cleanliness issues which were the focus of the interventions. Open-ended qualitative responses were analyzed for recurring themes.

This research advances in the area of CBSM by presenting the figure of the “promotora” as a key element that helped to involve diverse groups of stakeholders as active members in two CBSM interventions, and who also facilitated socialization, penetration and co-responsibility in the community in two cleaning interventions. Promotoras have the knowledge of community conditions and the skills necessary to engage community stakeholders in the objectives of a program with community level benefits.

This comparative analysis identifies that CBSM interventions that include promotoras can engage a diverse group of stakeholders achieving participation and co-responsibility in cleaning their environment.

The purpose of this paper is to design a community‐based social marketing (CBSM) campaign to foster sustainable behavior change in paper reduction, commingled recycling, and purchasing environmentally preferred products (EPP) with faculty and staff at Pacific University Oregon.

A CBSM campaign was developed after a nine month pilot study. A six‐month mixed methods research approach used pre‐postsurveys, office supply purchasing reports, a recycling study, and a waste audit. The CBSM campaign strategies used were prompts, communication, incentives, commitment, convenience, norms and social diffusion.

The campaign titled, Greening Pacific! successfully identified and ranked key barriers to paper reduction, recycling and purchasing environmentally preferable products and developed CBSM tools and materials that were instrumental in affecting change. The CBSM campaign strategies and materials that were effective include recycling and paper reduction prompts, a sustainable office pledge, initiating a green team and training staff leaders, and deskside recycling box distribution. An increase in campus‐wide purchasing of recycled content paper and EPP was found. Post‐survey results found that 74 percent of staff and faculty changed their behavior because of the CBSM campaign.

The study could have benefited from a longer data collection period.

Establishing aspects of green office practices on campuses can have significant impacts on purchasing EPP, waste reduction, energy and cost savings, and reducing the use of toxic chemicals. CBSM is a valuable framework for fostering behavior change.

Community‐based social marketing provides higher education institutions and other organizations with an effective model to foster environmental change in a targeted and community‐oriented way.

This study aims to examine whether a community-based suicide prevention project could increase willingness to seek professional help for suicidal ideation among young people.

Online surveys were administered at baseline (n = 224) and six months post-test (n = 217), consisting of the Risk Behavior Diagnosis scale; self-report questions on suicidality; willingness to engage with suicide prevention resources; and willingness to communicate with peers, family members, teachers or counselors about suicide.

A comparison of means within groups from pre- to post-test showed increases in self-efficacy for communicating about suicidal concerns with a teacher, school counselor or social worker; increases in self-efficacy for helping others; and increases in response-efficacy of interpersonal communication about suicide with a teacher, school counselor or social worker.

Young adults need to be willing and able to intervene in life-threatening situations affecting their peers. In step with narrative empowerment education, personal experiences can be used to communicatively reduce peer resistance to behavior change.

Health communicators tend to rely on overly didactic education and awareness-raising when addressing suicide prevention. This research shows the importance of direct and personal forms of influence advocated by social marketing professionals.

This study aims to understand the utility of personas and illustrate, through a case study, how a persona-building exercise in a Community Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) training of community leaders elicited important insights that complemented findings from ongoing formative research on vaccine hesitancy in the Hispanic/Latino population in the USA during COVID-19 pandemic.

An exploratory concurrent parallel qualitative study design compared three personas created by community-based organization members (n = 37) to transcripts from five formative research focus groups (n = 30) from the same project. All participants in this study were recruited by the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network as part of their capacity-building and formative research activities. Grounded theory guided the content analysis.

This study found personas and focus groups to be complementary. A high degree of co-occurrence was observed when investigating the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine under the categories of barriers, culture and communication. Between the two methods, the authors found strong associations between fear, disruption to the value system, work-related barriers, inaccessibility to health care and information sources and misinformation. Areas of divergence were negligible.

While personas provided background information about the population and sharing “how” to reach the priority population, focus groups provided the “why” behind the behavior, followed by “how”.

A community-driven persona-building process built on cultural community knowledge and existing data can build community capacity, provide rich information to assist in the creation of tailored messages, strategies and overall interventions during a public health crisis and provide user-centered, evidence-based information about a priority population while researchers and practitioners wait on the results from formative research.

This case study provided a unique opportunity to analyze the complementary effectiveness of two methods acting in tandem to understand the priority population: stakeholder-informed persona-building and participant-informed focus group interviews. Understanding their complementary nature addresses a time gap that often exists between researchers and practitioners during times of crises and builds on recommendations associated with bringing rigor into practice, promoting academic contribution to real-world issues and building collaborative partnerships. Finally, it supports the utility of a nimble tool that improves social marketers’ ability to know more about their audience for intervention design when time is of the essence and formative research is ongoing.

A community‐based social marketing (CBSM) campaign to reduce student electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions was undertaken at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Social marketing methods follow a commercial marketing model and involve market research into the planning, pricing, communication, distribution, and evaluation of methods designed to encourage a desired behavior change rather than a product. Two upper‐class suite‐style dorms were used in the study. Residents of the control dormitory were exposed to an educational program on climate change detailing how their electricity and computer use creates greenhouse gas emissions. Residents of the experimental dorm were exposed to the same educational program as well as a social marketing campaign encouraging students to turn personal computers off when not in use. Before and after surveys suggested that the social marketing campaign had a greater impact on student environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors than the educational program alone.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the competing effects of brand community participation, which should enhance loyalty to both the brand and to already-owned products, against switching costs, which should make consumers sensitive about the financial costs associated with new products.

Using the participation and weekly adoption data from 7,411 members in two brand communities and one product category forum over a six-month period, switching costs were computed for each member using 10 years of product release and pricing data.

Consistent with prior research, switching costs had a significant effect on reducing product adoption. Brand community participation also had a significant effect on overcoming switching costs. However, these main effects were qualified by an interaction, such that the most active participants were more likely to buy the new product when switching costs were higher.

Most importantly, these findings provide unique insights into financial switching costs and demonstrate ways in which brand community participation provides a way to mitigate switching costs for consumers who would most be affected by them.

The purpose of this paper is to recommend behavioral targets for future interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at college campuses and to advise interventionists on how to choose between many potential behavioral targets.

The authors used the community-based social marketing (CBSM) methodology over two studies. In Study 1, the authors assessed adoption rates (i.e. penetration) and likelihood of adoption (i.e. probability) for 16 potential behavioral targets. In Study 2, the authors used quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the barriers and benefits of engagement in five of the top-performing behaviors from Study 1.

The findings suggest that an intervention to promote purchasing green energy credits (GECs) has a high potential to reduce emissions. Purchasing GECs has a small penetration (<7%) and a large impact (1,405 kgCO₂e/person/year). Compared to the other four behaviors the authors examined in Study 2, purchasing GECs is also more convenient and requires very little time. Thus, the behavior should be appealing to many individuals interested in reducing emissions or protecting the environment.

The authors performed a holistic evaluation of potential behavioral targets that included a barrier and benefit analysis, in addition to the traditional CBSM method of combining impact, probability and penetration.