Commercial marketing and public health : like oil and water? A sociological analysis of the VERB social marketing campaign
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[EMBARGOED UNTIL 05/01/2026] The purpose of this dissertation is to apply the tools of sociological inquiry to critically examine the social marketing approach to health promotion in public health through a case study of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) VERBTM "It's What You Do!" national mass media campaign, which used social marketing to encourage 'tweens' (aged 9-13) to be physically active between 2002-2006. Funding for the VERB campaign was the most amount of money for a single initiative that the CDC had ever received and has since become one of the most well documented public health campaigns ever. Through a theoretically informed interpretive qualitative analysis, this research aims to contribute to the small but growing literature on the sociology of public health and health promotion, through an analysis of a social marketing campaign, in particular. Using discourse analysis of campaign documents, this research seeks to deepen understanding about and explore the implications of adopting market model commercial marketing techniques for improving public health and society from a sociological perspective.
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Ph. D.