Ethical persona segmentation for offshore wind social marketing: a community engagement framework

Purpose Community responses to offshore wind infrastructure are often misinterpreted as information deficits addressable through generic communication. This paper challenges that view by developing and validating an ethical persona segmentation framework that maps community moral orientations from advocacy to resistance and examines implications for targeted social marketing. Design/methodology/approach A three-stage multi-method design analysed 3,215 public submissions and 4,134 Facebook and Reddit comments using attitude and cognitive bias coding. Eight empirically grounded personas were developed and validated through two participatory roundtables. Ethical pluralism underpinned the framework, with framing theory linking analysis to engagement strategy. Findings Eight distinct ethical orientations structure community responses to offshore wind, ranging from utilitarian consequentialism among aligned segments to biocultural and justice-based ethics among persuadable segments, and populist institutional distrust among resistant segments. A key structural distinction emerges: persuadable frames exhibit calibrated negativity with implicit resolution pathways, whereas resistant frames exhibit totalising negativity, in which counter-evidence is reprocessed as further proof of deception. A reachability spectrum organises these orientations into three strategically distinct groups. Proxy framing, the deployment of available arguments as substitutes for identity-based resistance, is identified as a significant under-theorised phenomenon with a detectable appraisal signature. Practical implications Governments, developers and community organisations should replace uniform communication strategies with segment-specific, ethics-informed engagement approaches. Resources directed at resistant segments are most effectively deployed upstream in the media and information ecosystem rather than through direct community engagement. Originality/value This study makes three original contributions: the introduction of ethical orientation as a primary social marketing segmentation variable; the reachability spectrum as a social marketing planning tool; and a replicable, multi-method persona development methodology that combines corpus appraisal analysis with participatory stakeholder validation.