Social marketing: The role of Facebook as a digital technology for social mechanisms and behaviour change in the context of obesity and healthy lifestyles

Tomorrow’s world is radically different to the one that social marketing was born into over 50 years ago (Taubenheim et al., 2008; Galiano-Coronil and MierTeran-Franco, 2019). Social marketing is propelling forward into a future of big change defined by a pandemic, climate change, social inequalities and the proliferation and normalisation of digital technologies. Like commercial marketing, digital technologies when they first emerged 1-2 decades ago were viewed by social marketers as technologies for communication or promotion only. However, these technologies have widespread ripple effects beyond communication; they have shifted power to the citizen and increased the interconnectedness of stakeholders, in turn facilitating multi stakeholder, non-linear relationships that ebb and flow. Considering this, digital technologies present unique opportunities for social marketers to leverage the empowerment and individual agency of stakeholders to co-create mutually beneficial change. However, much remains nebulous about the use of these technologies for behaviour change outside of their previously documented use as communication and promotion technologies (Dooley et al., 2014; Moorhead et al., 2013; Sashi, 2012). To address this gap, this study utilises a longitudinal case study consisting of three distinct stages; (1) a systematic literature review; (2) empirical research; and (3) secondary data analysis. The context of this study emanates from Operation Transformation, a healthy lifestyle reality programme designed to fight against the growing obesity rates in the Republic of Ireland. This study demonstrates that digital technologies are facilitating research, multi-level segmentation and targeting, complex exchanges, operationalising theories of change, delivering the product, place, facilitating service delivery, and targeting individual citizens as well as meso and macro audiences. These technologies are supporting multi-level and multifaceted interventions, co-ordinated and integrated behavioural change interventions across target audiences from citizens to communities to policy makers and governance. Importantly, in adopting the lens of Layton (2015) social mechanism theory this study xiii illustrates how digital technologies and particularly Facebook are facilitating social mechanisms; where value can be co-created, where trust, collaboration, and cooperation can take place and where individuals and communities self-organise as they act and react to one another. Furthermore, it expands our understanding and application of behaviour change in social marketing and signifies a shift towards systems-based approaches in social marketing where consideration is given to the linkages, interactions and relationships among elements and stakeholders of a system and how they evolve and adapt over time. This research makes a number of important theoretical and methodological contributions. Firstly, this research provides the first empirical application of social mechanism theory in a systems social marketing and digital technology setting. Consequently, it contributes to our understanding of the role of Facebook as a technology that facilitates social mechanisms, beyond communication, for behaviour change. In addition, it offers an additional new social mechanism, framing, for consideration. Furthermore, this study examines the inner anatomy of macro-social marketing and systems social marketing and addresses the conceptual and definitional ambiguity between the two approaches. Finally, it provides a longitudinal investigation of a complex social problem and allows us to investigate the relational nature of complex exchanges and how they evolve over time.2026-08-0