Correspondence: Bradley R. Barnes, Kent Business School University of Kent Canterbury CT2 7PE, UK. Tel: +44 1227 827 729; Fax: +44 1227 761 147; e-mail: b.r.barnes@kent.ac.uk

¹is a vascular surgeon in private practice in Pretoria, South Africa, where she is also an adjunct professor of surgery at the university. She specialises in the insertion of arterial stents, and runs a diabetic foot clinic. She has taught and researched in Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA and Morocco, and 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 a 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 Professor of International Management at the University of Kent, UK. 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. He 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 22 November 2007; Revised 22 November 2007; Published online 28 December 2007.

Abstract

Diabetes is not only a serious health problem in developed nations, it is also a critical dilemma in the developing world — and the crisis is growing. Despite this emerging concern, relatively little is known about attitudes toward the disease, particularly with regard to cognition, affective aspects and behavioural intentions. This paper reports on the preliminary development of a scale designed to assess attitudes regarding diabetes in South Africa. It then ties attitudes toward diabetes to physician compliance using the same respondents. The findings suggest that those patients with the lowest levels of diabetes knowledge are also those least likely to comply with the instructions of healthcare professionals, a scenario that does not bode well for the treatment of the disease in this sample. Implications for public health marketing are discussed, limitations of the study acknowledged and avenues for future research identified.