Evaluation of perception to different stimuli by cognitive and emotional reaction for neuromarketing application

The antismoking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) have been designed with the aim of successfully reduce smoking in people and to prevent the beginning of this dangerous habit in non-smokers. PSAs success is reflected by the decreasing of smoking rate in several European countries. However, the EU’s smoking rate among adults is falling too slowly to meet the EU government’s goal. This could be due to ineffective nature of the delivered antismoking messages and/or to particular communication styles possibly causing the “boomerang effect” on smokers, eliciting in them the urge to smoke. Furthermore, tobacco consumption is highly influenced by socioeconomic factors, affecting mostly low- and middle-income countries, but also vulnerable populations within high income countries, and finally the young population as being at higher risk of developing tobacco addiction. Additionally, smoking causes health inequality between gender and age groups, also significantly elevating the preventable morbidity and premature mortality worldwide. Consequently, it clearly appears the need to design antismoking campaigns that could be effective regardless of socioeconomical variable. When effective, PSAs are of substantial benefit to public welfare, but the lack of reliable, quantitative and objective tools of evaluating advertising effectiveness before the dissemination is one of the key impediments to the obtainment of better PSA outcomes. Basing on these considerations, it appears useful to apply Neuroscientific techniques to the PSAs testing in order to: investigate the existence of neurophysiological features associated to the perception of Effective, Ineffective and Awarded PSAs assess whether the socio-economic variables can influence the perception of antismoking PSAs These are the experimental questions that my PhD research activity tried to answer, with the aim to understand if it would be possible to develop efficient and cost-effective antismoking campaigns, valid for the different EU countries.