Lukas Parker

Associate Professor Lukas Parker is a leading researcher and educator in social marketing and advertising and communicating health. He co-leads the Communication Collaboratory.

Associate Professor Lukas Parker is a leading social marketing and advertising scholar whose research sits at the nexus of behaviour change, communicating health and digital advertising. Leading teams of researchers, his research addresses pressing social problems related to health and sustainability. He has over fifty peer-reviewed publications including influential co-authored books Social Marketing and Advertising in the Age of Social Media (2020) and Social Marketing and Behaviour Change: Models, theory and applications (2014) which guide social marketing practitioners and scholars.

Associate Professor Parker’s highly applied research has informed and assessed social and behaviour change communication campaigns and government policy. His recent government and industry partners include VicHealth, Football Victoria, Sustainability Victoria, Woolworths and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Associate Professor Parker is a highly accomplished educator with extensive international experience over two decades, in Australia, South Korea and Vietnam. He currently teaches into the Master of Advertising and Bachelor of Communication (Advertising) degree programs. His teaching intersects with his research and is focused on social change and engaging with industry, government and community. An example of this is his popular course, Wicked Problems: Innovative Solutions challenges multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate and masters students in an intensive series of workshops tackling complex wicked problems that do not have clearly identifiable solutions. It employs a design thinking process where students consider problems through engaging in co-creation with those most connected to the problem (target audience, experts in the field, stakeholders, organisations) to challenge assumptions and to create positive, participant focused solutions.

Associate Professor Parker is on the management committee of the Australian Association of Social Marketing (AASM) and a member of the Australia-New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC) and the International Social Marketing Association (ISMA).

Associate Professor Lukas Parker’s research interests are social and government marketing and especially the influence of marketing communication and advertising on behaviour. His research is published extensively in peer reviewed journals and books in the fields of advertising, social marketing and behaviour change. His current research is focused on communicating health and pro-environmental behaviours. His communication research addresses pressing social problems including promoting healthy masculinities, healthy eating, road safety and waste reduction. He has collaborated with AIP Foundation (Vietnam), Institute of Public Health (Vietnam) and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (USA). His research teams undertake research for Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, VicHealth, Pacific Environments, Australian Conservation Foundation, Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anticorruption Commission and the University of the Third Age (U3A).

Digital, Digital Advertising, Social Marketing, Health Communication, Behaviour Change, Social Media, Social Advertising, Sustainability, Sustainable Behaviour, Consumer Behaviour, Gamification

Associate Professor Parker co-leads the Communication Collaboratory. He supervises PhD projects focused on:

• Communicating Health
• Social Communication including Advertising
• Sustainability and the environment
• Social media (advocacy, healthy lifestyles, marketing)
• Games and gamification in health
• Industry partnered research

He supervises PhD projects involving qualitative and quantitative techniques, in Traditional Thesis, PhD with publication and PhD by Project modes.

Current

• Phan Nhat Tram: Mindfulness, Sustainable Consumption, and Well-Being
  
• Bonnie Stevens: Experiential Audience Engagement through a Communities of Practice-based Approach to Publishing
• David Micallef: Adapting lifestyles for health: young people and their lived experiences.
• Jon Hewitt: Navigating the social and the commercial: Marketing fashion based Social Enterprise in Southeast Asia.
• Katia Ostapets: Promoting health in young adults by harnessing the power of health and wellbeing influencers. Estimated
• Marcelo Toledo Cardenas: Participatory Guarantee Systems: Investigating how communities in tourist destinations organize sustainable and equitable hospitality services
• Shatha Fahad Alamer: Consumers Attitudes and Purchase Intentions in Regard to Organic Food as Ugly Food
  

Recent

• Sy Nurleyana Wafa Sy Naguib Wafa (Completed: 2022): Augmented Reality Adoption in Marketing Communications: Agency Practitioner and Client Perspectives.
• Luu Thi Thao Nguyen (Completed: 2022): The Emergence of a Hybrid Market for Social Enterprises
• Daniel Burns (Completed: 2021): Framing the Environment A critical analysis of news media in Vietnam
• Supanida Chantarin (Completed: 2019): Taking student-centred learning outside its comfort zone: student and staff experiences of international higher education in Vietnam.
• Hayat Alzhrani (Completed: 2019): Communication strategies to enhance health behaviour of women in Saudi Arabia.
• Nguyen Anh Thu (Completed: 2018): Exploring consumers' green purchase intention for a packaged food product with regard to eco-friendly packaging: the case of packaged instant noodles in Vietnam.