title: The CBE process in action. Operationalising Social Marketing research to practice
Creators: name: Durl, James E
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social Marketing
subject: CBE process
subject: BMA
subject: Behaviour change

description: Externally developed school programs suffer from a range of issues including lack of outcome evaluation, resource intensiveness, fidelity, limited involvement of stakeholders during program design and development, and failing to embed theory or curriculum standards into program design. Consequently, schools are apprehensive to uptake external school programs. This PhD outlines a program of research that overcomes known limitations of externally developed programs. The Co-create Build and Engage process (CBETM) underpins the design of Blurred Minds, an alcohol and drug education program that has been iterated over time. CBE is a three-step process that outlines the sequence of social marketing principles and activities that are used to design social marketing offerings with the people they are designed to serve. This PhD research ran alongside the development of numerous resources of the Blurred Minds program, a decade-spanning effort to provide schoolbased alcohol and drug education and resistance training. Of these resources, the CBE process was first used to build a brief Blurred Minds program and evaluate it against the longer and older Blurred Minds program offering. Similarly, the CBE process guided the development of a different Blurred Minds offering known as the Blurred Minds Academy (BMA). Through these two distinct Blurred Minds offerings, the CBE process is discussed, and activities undertaken for each stage of the process is outlined. The co-creation and engage phases of CBE are documented more comprehensively in the literature than the build phase, with multiple tools detailed in the evidence base demonstrating how insights are created with stakeholders (e.g., co-design, living lab, collective intelligence, design thinking), to numerous types of communication approaches that are applied to effectively engage and the measurement tools that are applied by teams to evaluate program effectiveness (e.g., process, outcome and impact assessment). The build stage however features relatively fewer articles and resources that are clearly relevant to draw upon. Consequently, there is contention around what ‘building’ and ‘iterating’ a program entail. Novice social marketers seeking to take insights arising from co-creation are left with little understanding of how to convert insights into a program capable of achieving intended outcomes. To break down the series of activities and processes required to build, understanding needs to be gained on what needs to be built, how, when, where and why, to ensure a solution that is ready for implementation is delivered. This thesis illustrates the CBE process across two distinct iterations of the Blurred Minds program, highlighting the principles and activities applied in the co-create, build, and engage phases to create improved Blurred Minds offerings. This thesis is delivered as a series of publications, and each study is outlined hereafter. The research design described in this thesis commences with the co-creation step (Study 1, published - Health Education Journal), wherein a systematic literature review was utilised to explore Virtual Reality interventions in alcohol education targeting adolescents. Next, build and engage are explored (Study 2, published - Journal of Social Marketing), which compares the original comprehensive workshops of the Blurred Minds program to a brief workshop alternative. Each of these program modes featured the VR house party simulation, developed partly as a result of findings from study 1. The second iteration of Blurred Minds discussed - namely the BMA - is then explored in studies 3 and 4. First, study 3 (published - Health Promotion International) focuses on co-creating the next iteration of Blurred Minds resources with teachers and students. Specifically, it presents a short series of co-design sessions exploring the voices of students and teachers as distinct but related stakeholders in the design and implementation of new school-based alcohol and drug education resources. Study 4 (Submitted – Journal of Social Marketing), focuses on how the new Blurred Minds Academy was built using Social Cognitive Theory and a Curriculum audit (Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education). Finally, study 5 (Submitted - Social Marketing Quarterly) is presented to contrast decisions made across studies 1 &amp; 2, and studies 3 &amp; 4, broadly to explore CBE in practice, and more specifically to provide some detail on the elusive build stage. This thesis contributes knowledge for social marketing academics and practitioners expanding explanations for how the CBE process is applied. Activities including a systematic review, outcome evaluations, co-design sessions and curriculum auditing are presented in order to demonstrate how each stage of CBE can be approached, and how activities undertaken contribute to subsequent stages. Finally, this thesis provides an important future research agenda for the success of BMA and some important considerations for CBE.