Any form of marketing, but especially #behaviour change or #social purpose / #social marketing,  quite rightly puts great emphasis on rigorous research and insight in shaping and delivering effective initiatives that help change behaviour.

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

Presentations at the recent 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 culled from a guilty pleasure / 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 research laboratory to use, amongst other things, brain and eye scanning equipment to track where the eye moves in response to a piece of communication and highlights which areas of the brain are stimulated. The benefits include increased certainty about the potential effect of our campaign interventions, as well as greater granularity and analysis of what really works in actually engaging our audience. It adds an empirical validation layer to qualitative co-design research – which is pivotal – but reflects what people say will work, rather than what actually works in real life.

So why has the behaviour change community not adopted science more widely? Cost?  Very likely. Hiring your average shiny MRI scanner for the day is not the cheapest activity in the social marketeers’ handbook.  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 and certain colours can link to certain causes messages or feelings (green = environmental, blue = medical etc) So nothing that we couldn’t have gained from other literature.

This plays into the rather dog-eared ‘marketing: is it art or science (or both) debate’ which I will write an excitable book about at some stage. But the key issue boils down to this: science undoubtedly provides the gold standard in pre-testing, working up and evaluating campaigns. The limiting factors are usually time, expense and the need to act quickly. Pragmatism is often key.

A quick story to prove a 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 against other activities and also doing nothing.

There were, however, other smaller studies to show masks worked. Ultimately it came down to: the need for fast action to save lives,  pragmatism, common sense, and the ‘do no harm’ principle (ie mask wearing will not harm the majority of wearers and there is likely to be large benefits.) So many countries made mask-wearing a requirement in public spaces. And there is no doubt that masks 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 we needed to do something pretty damn quickly to reduce the spread of the virus.

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.’  And on the role of science – we should always be aware of, and strive to use, more gold standard scientific research techniques to shape and evaluate a campaign – but given resource and time limitations – it is totally valid to use other more rapid research techniques where needed. Sometimes the pivotal issue is getting our message out there.