EVALUATION OF THE THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL MARKETING AND ITS ROLE IN DESIGNING INTERVENTIONS ON SEXUAL HEALTH

Purpose – The aim of this research is to develop a new social marketing framework for the design and implementation of a social marketing intervention. Literature Review - This research challenged two notions. Firstly, social marketing has not been effectively used to design interventions for sexual health. Secondly, many existing social marketing planning approaches are either too simplistic or too complicated to be used in current social marketing practice. The literature review identified a knowledge gap that there is a need to develop a new social marketing framework that must be based on understanding consumer behaviour at a deeper level and the process of co-creation, ethical principles and sustainability in the changed behaviours. This framework must emphasise working with people to define problems, develop solutions, deliver them and evaluate success for sustainable outcomes. Method – This research was based on an inductive qualitative approach using a thematic analysis technique to analyse the data. The data was collected through the Delphi method (three rounds) from social marketing experts (practitioners and academics) from the UK, USA, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Pakistan. Round 1 of the Delphi method aided to develop the proposed framework of social marketing (data was collected using semi-structured questionnaires from 24 social marketing experts). Round 2 achieved consensus on the proposed framework using semi-structured questionnaires from 23 social marketing experts. In addition, a total of 9 respondents took part in semi-structured interviews for round 3, which assisted in validating the proposed framework. Data Analysis – The data was analysed using thematic analysis. Findings – The results of this research included a new framework of social marketing. The proposed framework is verified and declared suitable after the validation process to plan, design and implement a condom promotion campaign on promoting safe sex among young people in the UK. Limitations – A major research limitation was a lack of resources to implement the proposed
framework of social marketing to design and implement a condom promotion campaign on promoting safe sex among young people in the UK. Conclusions and Recommendations – The proposed framework of social marketing developed within this thesis is of greater theoretical and practical relevance. It is a dynamic model grounded in key principles of social marketing and benefits from earlier developed planning approaches to social marketing. The proposed framework of social marketing will inform academics in the form of social marketing theory development and practitioners in the
form of a new framework that integrates key strengths of existing social marketing planning approaches and emerging principles of social marketing (such as value-co-creation, citizen focus, ethical consideration and sustainability).