Social marketing for sustainability transitions: integrating behaviour change frameworks with transition management

Abstract

Sustainability has emerged as a defining challenge for contemporary societies, requiring not only technological innovation and policy reform but also profound changes in everyday behaviours, organisational routines, and social norms. The primary objective of the paper is to develop and justify a conceptual framework that embeds social marketing within sustainability strategies. Drawing on an integrative systematic literature review and conceptual synthesis across social marketing, behaviour change science, and sustainability transitions, the paper proposes a three-dimensional framework comprising: (1) behavioural diagnosis and audience segmentation, (2) value co-creation and stakeholder engagement, and (3) feedback and systemic reinforcement. The framework is designed to explain how pro-sustainable behaviours can be adopted, maintained, and scaled in ways that support longer-term socio-technical transitions. The results synthesise evidence showing that sustainability-oriented interventions are most effective when they move beyond generic awareness-raising and instead address heterogeneous behavioural barriers, involve stakeholders in co-design processes, and create reinforcing feedback loops aligned with infrastructures, institutions, and social norms. Behavioural diagnosis enables targeted intervention design by recognising differences in motivation, capability, opportunity, and social context. Value co-creation enhances relevance, legitimacy, and equity by engaging employees, communities, and cross-sector partners in shaping solutions. Feedback and systemic reinforcement support long-term maintenance by making outcomes visible, leveraging social influence, and embedding behaviours within supportive policy and service environments. The paper contributes theoretically by linking micro-level behaviour change mechanisms with meso- and macro-level sustainability transition dynamics. Practically, it offers organisations and policy actors a structured blueprint for operationalising sustainability goals through social marketing as a strategic capability rather than a communication tool. The article concludes by outlining directions for future empirical research to test the framework across industries, cultural contexts, and sustainability domains, with particular attention to scalability, ethics, and long-term impact.