Can social neuromarketing be useful to public policy?

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 need of effective Public Service Announcements - that is, public social campaigns: in this frame, neuromarketing can 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 fill a gap in the existing literature by verifying 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 critical interpretive review of the literature (McDougall, 2015), 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 an original model created by adapting existing literature (Argawal, 2014), which has the following managerial as well as social implications: neuromarketing can align citizens’ unconscious expectations towards welfare state, thus providing policy makers insights on how to create efficient public health communication. This implies that the discipline of neuromarketing has wide impact on many fields of the social sphere: finance, law, politics, education.