Impact of Social Marketing on changing littering behaviour in India

Abstract

Littering has been identified as a significant social issue in India that has negative impact on newlinethe environment as well as public health. A significant amount of research has been conducted newlineto understand and target littering behavior in developed nations. However, limited scholarly newlineresearch has been conducted on littering behavior in developing countries. Social marketing is newlinea powerful tool for changing and sustaining pro-environmental behaviors but so far no research newlinehas been found on the application of social marketing on changing littering behavior in India. newlineThe present research aims to fill this gap by integrating the two widely used social marketing newlinemodels; HBM and TPB with an extra factor namely environmental factors in a holistic model newlineto understand and predict anti-littering behavior in India. For data analysis, CFA and SEM newlinetechniques in AMOS 21.0 have been employed. In addition to this, the influence of newlinedemographic and psychological factors on the perceived threat, perceived benefits and newlineperceived barriers has been examined. The results of the study suggest that the perceived newlinebenefits and perceived barriers have a significant direct effect on the attitude towards antilittering newlinebehavior. No direct impact of perceived threat has been found on attitude towards antilittering newlinebehavior. The results also confirm the role of attitude, subjective norms, and selfefficacy newlinein influencing the anti-littering intention with attitude and subjective norms having a newlinegreater impact on intention as compared to self-efficacy. Furthermore, the results also highlight newlinethat the environmental factors and intention carry more weights than PBC in influencing antilittering newlinebehavior. Recognizing the importance of sequential mediators in the present study, the newlineresults of the serial mediation analysis revealed that attitude and intention sequentially mediate newlinethe path linking perceived benefits, perceived barriers and anti-littering behavior. The findings newlineof the present research provide significant academic and social marketing