Systems thinking social marketing: conceptual extensions and empirical investigations
ABSTRACT Systems thinking dominated the 2015 World Social Marketing conference with the premise that a more holistic approach takes into account all the issues at play for effective change. Augmenting the broadening social marketing literature, we contend that systems thinking social marketing enhances the field's conventional behavioural change with concepts of scale, causation, and iterative co creating change processes for complex health and environmental problems. The results of our empirical Sea for Society study, a sustainable European marine ecosystem examination of what the barriers to change are and how they are interrelated, find systems thinking social marketing offers the potential to strategically and critically reinforce, not replace, behavioural change campaigns. With systems thinking social marketing, a coherent theory of change becomes a possibility. Orchestrating social change may become a reality.