Responses when the earth trembles: The impact of community awareness campaigns on protective behavior

This study takes a social marketing perspective to explore community disaster preparedness by considering (1) appropriate sources of information about disaster severity, (2) the ways that community members process information, and (3) how social marketing programs might improve people's ability to protect themselves against natural disasters. With a foundation in the persuasion knowledge model and a scenario-based approach, the authors apply a latent moderated structural equation model to data collected in southern Spain. Consumers first develop persuasion knowledge about a social marketing campaign by performing a threat appraisal and then engage in information seeking, which drives persuasion coping, before activating protective behavior. Systematic processing attenuates the effect of response barriers on persuasion coping but strengthens the subsequent effects of persuasion coping on protective behavior. Social marketers should encourage consumers to engage with community programs and help revise public policy to enhance communities' capacities to react to seismic disasters. This article also suggests implications related to the uses of social media and the adoption of the European Union's advanced seismic code.