title: Social Marketing and the Corruption Conundrum in Morocco: An Exploratory Analysis
Creators: name: Hamelin, Nicolas
Publisher: name: The University of East London
Year: 2016

description: The modern world is characterised by socio-economic disruptions, civil unrests, and
weakening of many societal institutions, amongst many other challenges to our social fabric.
Therefore, scholars are increasingly scouring a wide variety of conceptual prisms to seek
explanations and possible solutions to those problems contemporaneously manifesting
themselves. The pervading force of corruption, across the globe, remains a major concern
among nations, multilateral agencies, such as Transparency International, and more profoundly
in major business and public policy discourses. For many developing countries, especially
those with weak institutions, high levels of corruption are causatively associated with high
levels of poverty, poor economic performance and under-development.
Against this background, using the Kingdom of Morocco as a contextual base, this
thesis explores the growing incidence of corruption, which has stunted the nation’s positive
development, as well as its triggers, antecedents and consequences. Whilst the literature is
replete with treatments of corruption across time and space, such treatments have focused on
social and macroeconomic underpinnings but largely lack rigorous marketing-framed
explorations. Following on from this lacuna, this thesis situates the treatment of corruption in
Morocco within the conceptual frame of social marketing — a demonstrably robust platform
for analysing societal issues and, indeed, a validated behavioural intervention model.
A two-pronged data collection method was applied, based on the positivistic
paradigm and involving a total of 1,000 respondents. Data analysis was accomplished
through the use of logistic regression and propensity score matching techniques to
remove socio-demographics biases. Findings based on micro-level data revealed salient
socio-demographic and societal factors of corruption, such as gender-gap, in justifiability
of corruption and corruption intention. Over twice as many men (20.5 per cent) stated
that they could be tempted by corruption, whereas the rate for women was 8.4 per cent.
In terms of social marketing campaigns, the evaluation shows that the campaign did
manage to raise awareness among the public by about 60 per cent, it also changed
perceptions about corruption with a modest but significant 8.2 per cent increase among
population perceiving corruption as immoral. Similarly, respondents exposed to the campaign
had a 20.8 per cent higher intention to change their proclivity towards corruption compared
with the population not exposed to the campaign — with family influence reported as the main
predictor of intention to change.

The uniqueness of this thesis lies in its pioneering and boundary spanning role, contextspecific
statistical treatment of data to achieve empirical substantiation and, at the same time,
this thesis puts the markers in place for future studies. In this regard, the thesis is a significant
contribution to the empirical literature whilst simultaneously opening up a number of policy
trajectories for formulating and evaluating anti-corruption campaigns.