A segmented market, according to traditional methods, appears increasingly difficult in mature consumer markets. A common explanation is that the mature markets are often characterised by over-supply which results in a great variety of choices for the consumer. Furthermore, the consumer of today has a more complex and flexible purchase behaviour which is difficult to catch. This makes consumer segmentation difficult. International studies indicate that dividing consumers into generation cohorts might be advantageous in understanding consumers of today.

Our planet is faced with enormous challenges as the extreme weather events related to the human-caused climate change continue to gain strength. The scale of the problem has made changing human behaviour the central focus of sustainable development, and both public and private sector are expected to gain relevant expertise and introduce this work in their agenda. Over its 40-year history, social marketing has become an established field providing tools for social change, but compared to health promotion, sustainability has not been a major focus of social marketing research so far. At the same time, sustainable lifestyles are embedded in complex systems where both individual factors and those of physical and social environment play a defining role in their adoption. Communities are a good example of such environments, and they became the key focus of Community-Based Social Marketing, which combines different insights from psychology to suggest a step-by-step framework for crafting behaviour change campaigns. However, it has not been applied to larger and diverse communities, like cities, and has not focused on sustaining new behaviour over time, which is crucial for creating sustainable lifestyles.