Correspondence: Bradley R Barnes, Leeds University Business School Maurice Keyworth Building Leeds LS2 9JT UK. Tel: +44 113 343 7017; Fax: +44 113 343 1807; e-mail: brb@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

¹is a vascular surgeon in private practice in Pretoria, South Africa, where she is also a consultant in surgery to the university. She specialises in the insertion of arterial stents, and runs a diabetic foot clinic. She has presented many papers at academic conferences, and published in medical journals.

²is a PhD candidate at the Lulea University of Technology, Sweden. She is a director of Gluemetric, a marketing research company in Pretoria, South Africa, and she also teaches marketing as an adjunct member of faculty at Ecole Nationale Ponts et Chaussees, Paris, France. Her work has appeared in journals such as Advertising Express and International Journal of Technology Marketing.

³is Professor of Marketing at the Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. His work has been published in The Journal of Advertising Research, The Journal of Advertising, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Sloan Management Review, Business Horizons, California Management Review, Communications of the ACM and MIS Quarterly (which he also served as Associate Editor), and in 2000 he was the recipient of the Tamer Cavusgil Award of the American Marketing Association for the best article in the Journal of International Marketing.

⁴is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Leeds University Business School. He initially studied for his undergraduate degree at Sheffield Business School, before completing his Masters in Marketing at the University of Huddersfield, and PhD from the University of Leeds. Bradley has published in a number of academic and practitioner-led Journals, including Industrial Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Medical Marketing and Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, among others.

Received 30 October 2006; Revised 30 October 2006.

Abstract

The notion of patient compliance is a significant topic of debate, as by nature it has implications on a broad community of stakeholders including pharmaceutical manufacturers, physicians who prescribe drugs, patients who may or may not decide to comply, as well as national governments that operate under budgetary constraints. Based on data collected from 2921 South Africa respondents, it would appear that in order to increase sample compliance, the various stakeholders in South Africa may need to undertake further research with the male population, young patients, the relatively more educated and middle income groups, as these sub-categories of individuals have less of a tendency to comply with their physicians' instructions when taking drugs.