Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Ph.D. is the Founder of Community-Based Social Marketing and author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior

Some thirty years ago, I coined the phrase “community-based social marketing” to describe a merger of knowledge between the fields of psychology and social marketing. I elected to call this amalgamation community-based social marketing for several reasons:

  1. The barriers to behavioral change are nearly always community-specific. If we don’t know what impedes a behavior’s adoption, we are ill-prepared to design and deliver effective programs.
  2. Personal interaction with members of our community is often the most effective method for changing behavior.
  3. Two of the most powerful levers for changing behavior, social norms and social diffusion, rely upon communities to be effective.

So what is community-based social marketing, or CBSM, as most people refer to it? CBSM is a framework for developing behavior change programs and involves five steps:

  1. Selecting Behaviors. There are nearly always a wide array of behaviors that we could target. The first step of CBSM is to narrow this list down to the most worthwhile behaviors to pursue.
  2. Identify Barriers and Benefits. Once we have identified the most important behaviors to target, we need to conduct audience research to determine what impedes the adoption of a behavior and what would motivate the public to adopt the action.
  3. Develop Strategies. In the third step of CBSM, we develop strategies to reduce the barriers to a behavior’s adoption while simultaneously emphasizing what our target audience sees as beneficial or worthwhile about undertaking the action.
  4. Pilot Test. Once we have developed several strategies, they are pilot tested on a small scale to identify which strategy encourages the most significant behavioral change at the least cost (e.g., has the highest return on investment).
  5. Broadscale Implementation. In the final step, the most effective strategy is broadly implemented and evaluated on an ongoing basis.

While the process of CBSM may be new to you, it has been effectively utilized in numerous programs across the globe and is an attractive alternative to simply providing information.

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