Gerard Hastings is the first UK Professor of Social Marketing and founder/director of the Institute for Social Marketing and Centre for Tobacco Control Research at Stirling and the Open University. He researches the applicability of marketing principles such as consumer orientation, relationship building and strategic planning to the solution of health and social problems. He also conducts critical marketing research into the impact of potentially health damaging marketing, such as alcohol advertising, tobacco branding and fast food promotion.
Prof Hastings has acted as an expert witness in litigation against the tobacco industry, Chairs the Advisory Board of the EC’s HELP campaign, and is a regular advisor to the World Health Organisation, and the Scottish, UK and European Parliaments. He also led the team of academics who conducted the Review of Research on the Effects of Food Promotion to Children which underpins the UK Government’s recent decision to restrict television advertising of energy dense foods to children.
Prof Hastings teaches and writes about social and critical marketing both in the UK, where he has run Masters and Honours level programmes, and internationally in North America, South East Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He has published over a hundred refereed papers in major journals such as the European Journal of Marketing, the International Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Macromarketing, Psychology and Marketing, Social Marketing Quarterly, the British Medical Journal, the British Dental Journal. His book Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil have all the Best Tunes? was published by Butterworth Heinemann in May 2007.
In 1997 Prof Hastings became the first Andreasen Scholar in Social Marketing and in 2009 was awarded the OBE for services to health care.