Any form of marketing, but especially social purpose marketing,  quite rightly puts great emphasis on rigorous research and insight in shaping effective initiatives that can help support people to make positive changes to their lives and others.

But is the research delivered truly scientific – even in part? And if it isn’t why not? Is it a lack of funding, skills or something else entirely?

Presentations at last year’s European Social Marketing Conference #ESMC24 in Ljubjana spotlighted how neuroscience and other disciplines can deliver a greater ‘appliance of science‘ to social purpose marketing  (full disclosure – the phrase is taken from a super-cheesy 1970’s advert for Zanussi washing machines (I think)).

Neuroscience has been utlilised by big brands for donkeys’ years and delves into the laboratory cupboards to borrow, amongst other things, brain and eye scanning equipment.  These can track our eye movements when we read a piece of communication and isolate what areas of the brain are being stimulated. The benefits include greater granularity of what really works in actually engaging our audience. It adds a validation layer to traditional qualitative research – which is pivotal – but reflects what people say will work, rather than what actually works in real life.

So why has social marketing not adopted science more widely? Cost?  Very likely. Hiring your average shiny MRI scanner for the day needs a pretty healthy bank balance.  Furthermore it is a natural inclination of our clients to spend the majority of a small budget on the actual campaign activity itself and use allowable and cost effective short-cuts in the research phase to isolate the effective insight that’s needed. Also there is a valid argument that neuroscience can tell us, for a pretty penny, what we already know from other data – ie people read posters from the top down (yup, honestly), engaging visual imagery draws our eye quickly (crazy eh!)

Science undoubtedly provides the gold standard in pre-testing, working up and evaluating campaigns. But do we have the time, budget and resources for it? Pragmatism is often key.

A quick story on this point. At the start of the pandemic – no major Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) had been conducted to show whether mask-wearing was effective in reducing the transmission of the virus that caused COVID. RCTs are seen as the research gold standard and analyse the effect of our campaign (or intervention) vs other activities and also doing nothing. But they can be expensive and take time.

There were, however, other types of studies to show that masks worked. And this combined with the application of the precautionary principle – ie they wouldn’t harm the vast majority of wearers – persuaded many countries to make mask-wearing a requirement in some public spaces. And there is no doubt that this saved many lives across the world.

The lesson is that despite the lack of gold standard scientific evidence to support the intervention – there was enough research to show masks would work and without a vaccine (at the point) we needed to do something pretty damn quickly to reduce the spread of the virus and reduce the tragic death toll.

Ultimately research, in all its varied forms, is pivotal to understanding our audience and creating, testing and evaluating an intervention. And I 100% agree with the maxim that marketing without data is like ‘driving with your eyes closed.’ But specifically on the role of science – we should always be aware of (and use) more gold standard scientific research techniques to shape and evaluate a campaign or intervention – but given resource and time limitations – it is absolutely valid to use other more rapid research techniques.

Marketing (in all its forms) is part art and part science – which is what makes it such a fascinating, challenging and rewarding area of work.