Using Co-Design to Create Community Advocacy for Biosecurity Behavior Change

Abstract

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.

Social marketing at 50: towards an epistemological expansion of the discipline to embrace diversity. A Viewpoint

“…Increase formal academic coursework (Akbar et al, 2021b;Foote and Kelly, 2022;Kassirer et al, 2019;Lee, 2020) and other professional development opportunities available in Global South countries (continued) Improve and reform academic reward systems by promoting inclusive metrics of success and impact (Davies et al, 2021) Conduct primary research in Global South settings to gain an understanding of the magnitude and complexity of "social marketing" practice in contexts Engage in and support cross-border research collaborations to promote the internationalisation of social marketing research (Truong et al, 2015) Consider alternative ways to ask for participant informed consent when investigating in contexts with cultural diversity. For example, gaining genuine consent from Indigenous participants may involve culturally appropriate protocols/methods for consent (Frisancho Hidalgo et al, 2015) Conduct literature and systematic reviews that lead to understanding the current status of social marketing in the Global South, considering publications and journals in native languages spoken in Africa, Asia and Latin America Support ethical publishing models (Veríssimo et al, 2020), e.g., ensuring reasonable and transparent publication fees and promoting open access Adopt equity-based "authorship" models for research publications (Cooke et al, 2021;Liboiron et al, 2017;McNutt et al, 2018) as well as supporting the shift from "authorship" to "contributions" via the CrediT model (Allen et al, 2019) Practice Foster genuine participatory and co-design practices (Bowie et al, 2020;Kubacki et al, 2020;McKercher, 2020;Rundle-Thiele et al, 2021;Sherring, 2021) (continued)…”

“…They are also the efforts most subject to criticisms related to power dynamics and audience orientation (Deshpande, 2019), with lingering accounts of external funding agencies and foreign social change agents pushing agendas that represent their own interests and priorities rather than those of the beneficiary communities (Aya Pastrana et al , 2022). Further, while participatory approaches and co-design methodologies have been increasingly championed and implemented in recent years (Bowie et al , 2020; Caballero et al , 2010; Knox et al , 2020; McKercher, 2020; Rundle-Thiele et al , 2021; Sherring, 2021), in many instances, social marketing in the Global South is still carried out in a top-down, colonial manner, as is the case with many other disciplines (Armenteras, 2021; de Vos, 2020), and in some circumstances, has even been called “pseudo-participatory” (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Tadajewski et al , 2014).…”

Picking Up the Beat: Social Marketing Academic Course Offerings and Trends as the Discipline Marks 50 Years

“…Finally, multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approaches are necessary in order to increase collaboration between social marketing academics and practitioners. This is necessary in general (Sherring & Foote, 2023), but particularly between the Global North and Global South (Cateriano-Arévalo et al, 2022).…”

The 5R Guidelines for a strengths-based approach to co-design with customers experiencing vulnerability

“…This provides scaffolded direction for ensuring that co-design methods in social marketing are empowering and systematic in adopting a strengths-based approach. There are already social marketing studies that use a strengths-based approach in co-design (Domegan et al, 2013; Raciti et al, 2022; Sherring, 2021; Trischler, Pervan, et al, 2018b), however without any guidelines or explicit calling out of the deficit approach, there is a risk that future social marketing studies will unintentionally perpetuate the deficit approach. This is particularly likely for researchers who are new to the social marketing field and are not familiar with strengths-based approaches.…”