CBSM vs. Social Marketing

From my perspective working in a city of about 100,000 people in New Zealand, I believe social martketing as a term could be applied to selling products or services using peer pressure.

My view of community based social marketing, it applies to a desired change in behaviour that benefits the greater good of the whole community. In New Zealand our Health Promotion people use it to encourage healthy eating and exercise. Those of us working in the environmental education area use it to encourage members of our community to alter their behaviours to protect both the environment and the wellbeing of our grandchildren/future communities.


Sandy Beath-Croft
Environmental Sustainability Advisor
Hutt City Council
New Zealand
www.huttcity.govt.nz

Chelsea, I was looking the same answer and in the process of writing this comment I think I figured it out! In Doug McKenzie Mohr's 2011 book 'Social Marketing to Protect the Environment' it states: "CBSM borrows from social marketing an emphasis on understanding what impedes and motivates a target audience to act as well as the importance of piloting programs prior to their broadscale implementation. From the social sciences, and particularly social and environmental psychology, CBSM inherits a variety of behavior-change "tools" that can be utilized to foster changes in behavior." If you compare social marketing steps to CBSM steps you'll see that CBSM adds additional tools to social marketing's 4Ps: commitment, prompts, norms, social diffusion. Social marketing only mentions the 4 Ps: products (called Goods and Services in CBSM), communication (called promotion in CBSM), price (called incentives/disincentives in CBSM) and place (called convenience in CBSM). I think there is a way you can stuff the additional CBSM tools into the 4Ps (e.g. a prompt could be thought of as a promotional piece, social norms could be considered when developing the creative strategy for promotion, etc), but CBSM makes it easier by removing a lot of the marketing lingo.

Also, I think the idea is that those additional tools are most effective on a smaller, community level (hence 'community-based...').

If you compare Kotler and Lee's social marketing steps (p. 36 of the 3rd ed of 'Social Marketing') to McKenzie Mohr's CBSM steps in 'Social Marketing to Protect the Environment' (p. 4) it appears that social marketing (SM) steps 1-4 become CBSM's step 1; SM & CBSM step 2 are the same; SM steps 6&7 (and probably 9 & 10) = CBSM step 3; CBSM then adds a step 4: pilot testing that SM doesn't have; and SM step 8 = CBSM step 5. Gosh! thanks for helping me sort that out, I've been wondering why it's been so difficult to mesh the 2 books' recommendations!

I would love to see if Doug McKenzie-Mohr agrees with this assessment.

Tina Woolston
Tufts University
United States