Social Marketing, Nudging Policies and Consumerism: Advancements Through Technologies from Neuroscience

Social marketing has done a lot, so far, to improve communication towards its audience in order to increase consumers’ (but simply citizens’) welfare and promote the consumeristic doctrine. Not by chance, the use of social marketing principles and techniques has been applied by some scholars also to an effective implementation of public health interventions; but in order to have an effective public health marketing communication, there is need of effective Public Service Announcements: public social campaigns useful in attracting, retaining and engaging people, and able to generate behavioral changes by stimulating interpersonal communication and word-of-mouth. In this frame, neuro-marketing can be useful in building effective PSAs—whose aim is sustaining social marketing—since it allows to understand the customers’ innermost and unconscious insights with a scientific reliability. In the last years, the emergence of neuroscience applied to marketing and economics has revolutionized the way of thinking to the customers’ insights, creating thus new languages and new challenges for the communicators and the policy makers. The present contribution aims to be a review of the state-of-the-art of the consumer neuroscience inter-discipline applied to the concerns typical of the consumerism, and tries to answer the question: is this niche methodology destined to be the next main one in the consumer and consumeristic research? What are the challenges and the difficulties to overcome in this sense?