Social Marketing and the Corruption Conundrum in Morocco: An Exploratory Analysis

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.