Effectiveness of biodiversity‐conservation marketing

Conservation marketing holds potential as a means to engage audiences with biodiversity conservation and help to address the human dimensions of biodiversity loss. Empirical evaluations of conservation marketing indicatives are growing, so we reviewed the literature on this research to inform future directions in the field. We used a systematic search strategy to identify studies that evaluated the effects of conservation marketing interventions (techniques and campaigns) on psychosocial outcomes, categorized as cognitive, affective, or behavioral. Six academic databases (Business Source Complete, Communication & Mass Media Complete, Greenfile, Proquest, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collections), 3 gray‐literature databases (BASE, Zenodo, and Google Scholar), and 2 websites (Rare and WildAid) were searched. Articles were subjected to critical appraisal to assess their methodological quality, and data were extracted from each article and analyzed using narrative synthesis. Altogether 28 studies from 26 articles were included in the review. Twenty‐five studies were conducted from 2014 through 2016. Methodological quality of most studies was weak (n = 16, 57%) (moderate quality n = 8, 29%; high quality n = 4, 14%). The proportion of studies that evaluated a conservation‐marketing technique (e.g., variants of texts, images, or videos) versus a campaign (e.g., community‐based campaigns targeting locally relevant issues, such as unsustainable palm oil agriculture, light pollution, or wood fuel fire use) was relatively balanced. Although many studies reported statistically significant results in the intended direction, the utility of findings was limited by persistent methodological limitations, such as a lack of a comparator group, use of non‐validated assessment tools, and a focus on self‐reported data and subjective outcomes. Conservation marketing is clearly a nascent field of scientific enquiry that warrants further, high‐quality research investigations. Efectividad de la Mercadotecnia de la Conservación de la Biodiversidad Resumen La mercadotecnia de la conservación tiene potencial como un medio para involucrar a audiencias en la conservación y ayuda a atender la dimensión humana de la pérdida de la biodiversidad. Ha habido un incremento de las evaluaciones empíricas de indicadores de la mercadotecnia de la conservación, por lo que revisamos la literatura sobre esta línea de investigación para dar información a trabajos futuros en este campo. Utilizamos