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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 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.

Effectiveness of message tactics in social marketing projects often varies across groups of individuals, which suggests the importance of tailoring communication approaches to maximize the success of promotional strategies. This study aims to contribute in this direction by using an innovative approach to promote targeted human papillomavirus vaccination, applying conjoint analysis to understand parental preferences for social media content features.

An online purpose-built quantitative survey was administered to a group of parents meeting eligibility criteria. The survey questions were designed based on inputs from formative qualitative research conducted in a previous phase of the study.

In the overall sample of 285 parents, responses show that image was the most important feature of social media posts overall, followed by source and text. Cluster analysis identified eight segments in the sample based on parental preferences for content features. Significant differences across segments were identified in terms of need for cognition, vaccine hesitancy, parental gender, concerns around side effects, trust in medical providers, information sharing behaviors on social media and information seeking online.

The application of conjoint analysis to promotional content allows to assess which features of the content are most important in persuading different individuals and provide insights on how people process the information, ultimately to inform targeted promotion based on preferences. Conjoint analysis has been widely used in consumer research to explore audience preferences for products or services, but only a few applications of conjoint analysis to the design and testing of promotional content are found in the literature.

In this paper we (a pracademic, a practitioner, and an academic) aim to explore the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing and offer recommendations to close it, while amplifying existing examples of best practice from within the field. We also propose a research agenda to spur dialog and guide further investigations in this area. Insights from prior research, coupled with the co-authors’ experience and observations, indicate that a disconnect does exist between academia and practice within social marketing, though it is admittedly and unsurprisingly not uniform across contexts and disciplinary areas. Given social marketing’s identity as a practice-oriented field, there are many existing examples of academic/practitioner collaboration and the successful linkage of theory and practice that deserve to be amplified. However, the challenges associated with the very different systems and structures affecting both worlds mean the disconnect is problematic enough to warrant systematic change to ensure the two worlds are more aligned.

This paper (a pracademic, a practitioner and an academic) explores the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing and offer recommendations to close it, while amplifying existing examples of best practice from within the field. The authors also propose a research agenda to spur dialog and guide further investigations in this area.

The authors suggest five key reasons that focus should be placed upon closing the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing: demonstrating societal value by contributing to practice; embedding and developing theories in practice; adding to the social marketing literature; contributing to social marketing teaching; and communicating the value and effectiveness of social marketing. To close the gap, the authors propose specific recommendations within four broad areas: marketing the academia and practitioner collaboration offer; building ongoing relationships; creating collaborative partnerships; and changing the publishing model ensuring communications are accessible to all. They also suggest ways for social marketing associations and peak bodies to play a role.

The concept of a disconnect between academia and practice is by no means new; it has been a pervasive issue across disciplines for decades. However, this issue has not been the subject of much discussion within the social marketing literature. Recommendations outlined in this paper serve as a starting point for discussion. The authors also acknowledge that due to long standing “bright spots” in the field, numerous examples currently exist. They place an emphasis upon highlighting these examples while illuminating a path forward.