Can social neuromarketing be useful to public policy?

Social marketing reflects “the use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify, or abandon a behaviour for the benefit of individuals, groups or society as a whole” (Kotler, Roberto & Lee, 2002). Some scholars (Craig Lefebvre & Flora, 1988) tried to apply the use of social marketing principles and techniques to an effective implementation of public health interventions, but in order to have an effective public health marketing communications, there is the need of effective Public Service Announcements - that is, public social campaigns: in this frame, neuromarketingcan be useful in building effective communication tools whose aim is sustaining social marketing, since it allows to understand the customers’ innermost and unconscious insights with a scientific reliability.The research aim of the present study, therefore, is to verify if and how neuroscience and neuromarketing tools can help national and local government in the implementation of more effective public campaigns. The methodology of the present explorative research provides a literature review regarding the social neuromarketing and the application of neuroscience and neuromarketing in the public policy, as well as a focus on the most relevant international case studies. The main results have highlighted the core mechanism of what can be called “social neuromarketing”, in the frame of a model created by adapting the existing literature (Argawal, 2014): neuromarketing can align citizens’ unconscious expectations towards welfare state, thus providing policy makers insights on how to create efficient public health communication.