Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the case study of the Ministry for Primary Industries’ (MPI) Border Compliance Social Marketing programme. This programme aims to change the behaviour of international visitors to New Zealand. This is to protect New Zealand’s important horticultural and agricultural industries and environment from harmful pests and diseases. The programme encourages travellers to leave potential biosecurity risk items at home, or at least declare them to border staff or dispose of in special amnesty bins at New Zealand’s airports on arrival. It also influences local communities to advocate to friends and family overseas on MPI’s behalf. Design/methodology/approach Aimed at visitors with the highest identified risk, the programme uses a range of interventions in the pre-travel, in-journey and upon-arrival stages of travel. It is underpinned by social marketing theory and models, qualitative and ethnographic research and an understanding of the passenger journey. Findings The programme has delivered a significant reduction in the number of passengers being caught with prohibited items and has influenced behaviours in packing bags before travel and declaring items for inspection on arrival in New Zealand. Originality/value The programme contributes to the New Zealand biosecurity system, which protects the country’s key horticultural and agricultural industries. For example, the horticultural industry contributes $5.6bn annually to the New Zealand economy. It also protects native flora and fauna, which is a large attraction to overseas visitors, and contributes to the $12.9bn tourism industry.

Background: New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) manages the “declare or dispose” biosecurity border compliance social marketing program. Its aim is to protect the country’s important horticulture and agriculture industries from imported pests and diseases, and its environment. The program encourages visitors to New Zealand to leave potential biosecurity risk items at home or dispose in specially marked bins on arrival. An important part of this is having New Zealand ethnic communities advocate on MPI’s behalf to friends and family overseas to follow the biosecurity rules. To fully engage the community to be advocates, it was felt that the community should be involved in the creation of this aspect of the program. Focus of the article: The article is a case study explaining how MPI used co-design methodology to create an advocacy program with a local community to assist behavior change in overseas visitors. The article focusses on the process and planning (including following a six-step co-design model) from a practitioners’ perspective to develop a program co-created with the target audience, rather than the final interventions developed. Program design/approach: The “declare or dispose” program had been solely “expert led” and designed by social marketers and researchers. The program is heavily influenced by a mix of quantitative and ethnographic research. These feed into customer journey mapping where interventions are inserted to influence audiences’ behavior. To assist in advocacy from the New Zealand Indian community to friends and family overseas, a customer led co-design process was developed to create community engagement and advocacy. Methods: MPI ran three co-design sessions involving members of local Indian community groups. The sessions used a mixture of card sorting and open discussion within small groups. The card sorting was used to review, and rate current interventions used in the behavior change program (including interventions both overseas direct to visitors and locally to community members). The open discussion asked participants to generate new ideas for potential new interventions to reach visitors. Results: Through the ranking of existing tools and participant suggestions of new ideas—MPI has developed an advocacy program that spans expert-led and user-led interventions. As hoped, the user-led suggestions were at a community-based level, resulting in a stronger buy-in from the community to deliver advocacy messages to overseas friends and family. Recommendations for practice: The article is useful for practitioners by detailing how to not only use co-design for creating new ideas, but also to evaluate existing ones to create a program blending both expert- and user-led interventions. MPI followed a six-step co-design process to organize its co-design program. This ensured that the right preparation was followed, sessions were effective, and the desired results of the program were achieved.

Four years ago, the late Dr. Susan Kirby wrote an editorial for Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) entitled "Social Marketing Practitioners: Should you share your work in SMQ?" (Kirby, 2019). Spoiler alert-the answer was a resounding "yes," as she noted her focus in becoming associate editor for the journal was "to advocate for practitioners, their viewpoints, their needs, and ways to engage them more fully in the journal" (p. 179). Upon her passing soon after the piece was published, Susan's friends and colleagues described her devotion to social marketing and her passion for supporting practitioners (Jordan et al., 2020). In her editorial, Susan emphasized that throughout her career, her goal had been to "engage practitioners in using better and more science and research in their social marketing practice" (p. 179). She linked practitioner publishing to this goal, essentially pointing out that if practitioners don't publish their work, how will others be able to conduct effective formative literature research and avoid reinventing the wheel? She went on to detail how she and SMQ planned to encourage practitioners to publish, including surveys to readers of SMQ to find out the needs of practitioners, a mentoring webinar, shortened review timeframes for article submissions, and developing a co-creation model to bring academics and practitioners together.Some of these actions have happened (such as the readership survey and webinar), and some are still in the works with the current editorial team committed to carrying on Susan's work (McDivitt, 2020).Why do we think the work Susan started is so important? Practitioners publishing in journals like SMQ play an important part in bringing the academic world and practitioners closer together, or "closing the academic/practitioner gap" as many have called it (Gray et al., 2011;Tapp, 2004;Tucker & Lowe, 2014; to name but a few). From a literature review that we've conducted, the conversation appears to be somewhat missing in social marketing circles.So what is the academic/practitioner gap? It's been defined as a "large gap between science and practice" and has gone under the various guises of the science/practice gap, academic/practitioner

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