Effectiveness of a brief versus a comprehensive social marketing program

<jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>Gamified and engaging school-based alcohol social marketing programs have demonstrated effectiveness; however, wide-scale dissemination of these programs is limited by their resource-intensive character. The purpose of this paper is to address this limitation, a brief alcohol social marketing pilot program was derived from a comprehensive alcohol social marketing program to compare effectiveness.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title> <jats:p>A sample of 115 14–16-year-old adolescents from six secondary schools participated in the brief alcohol social marketing pilot program. Program effectiveness was assessed using repeated measure analysis on adolescents’ knowledge, attitudes, social norms, self-efficacy and intentions to binge drink. Results were compared with the comprehensive social marketing program and a control group.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>The brief pilot program produced statistically significant outcomes for the same measures as the comprehensive program across attitudinal variables, descriptive norms and opportunistic self-efficacy.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Research limitations/implications</jats:title> <jats:p>Converting existing social marketing programs into brief alternates is more cost-effective and, in this case, demonstrated better outcome effects. However, findings are limited as in-depth comparisons were hindered by changes to content across program modes. No process for converting comprehensive programs into brief alternates was identified prior to this study, and therefore a number of considerations for program alteration were derived from program facilitator experiences.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title> <jats:p>The findings provide initial evidence that a brief version of an existing comprehensive program can be an effective alternate to more resource-intensive programs under more cost-effective circumstances for program developers and facilitators.</jats:p> </jats:sec>