Anti-vaxxers can make you a better marketeer
Winston Churchill once famously said “Never waste a good crisis”. Where there is great suffering, great lessons are to be learned. It is no different for the pandemic. Despite all the misery Covid causes, it can teach marketeers a thing or two about the complex nature of the relation between the messages brands are broadcasting and the decisions people take.
Finally there is some light at the end of the Corona tunnel, and that light is immunisation. Making populations immune by means of vaccination is the most successful public health intervention to date. Since its humble beginnings in 1796, no other medical practice has saved more lives than vaccination. So, how come that a growing number of people -nearly half of the Canadian population is concerned about vaccine safety- ignore the facts and evidence and decide that vaccines are dangerous?
Scientific publications discuss the potential causes of anti-vaxx popularity
https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0102-311X2020001405006&script=sci_arttext
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12325-020-01502-y
Conscious thinking does not control behaviour
The multitude of scientific articles that discuss the potential causes can be boiled-down into one fascinating conclusion. Above all, the anti-vaxx popularity confirms that human behaviour is not controlled, triggered, or motivated by information, facts or evidence. Behaviour is not controlled by deliberate conscious thinking, it is controlled by how the information is processed by sub-conscious or implicit brain processes.
Stored memories, existing convictions, deep-held beliefs and attitudes all have a tremendous influence over these implicit processes, and thus, the potential to determine the outcome. To smoothen and speed up these implicit processes, our brain uses a wide array of shortcuts -called biases- making the relation between information and behaviour even more unpredictable. This is why the same piece of information can motivate person A to move to the left and motivate person B to move to the right. Or to be pro or anti vaccinations.
It is almost impossible to predict the impact of a message
What does this all mean for marketing? In essence the goal of the marketeer is to influence decisions. In order to achieve this, marketeers broadcast information. This can take on many forms and is conveyed via many channels — but in essence that’s it.
Brands invest in communicating a message, and hope that it triggers a desired behaviour amongst the people on the receiving end. For instance, I use the supermarket to broadcast that I lower the price of my beer, and hope that more people start buying it. Or, I use social media to broadcast that a celebrity is wearing my sneaker brand, and hope that more people will like it.
However, the growth of the anti-vaxx movement teaches us that it is almost impossible to predict what impact a message will have -even when supported by a strong body of evidence. This is why it is very hard to forecast in what way the consumer’s behaviour will be altered by the message you are broadcasting — regardless of form and channel.
Taking Winston Churchill to heart
The rise of the anti-vaxx movement firmly confirms that -in contrast to common belief- deliberate conscious thinking does not control our behaviour. Biases and sub-conscious or implicit brain processes are in the driver’s seat -and that’s not making the life of the marketeer any easier.
The good news is that the marketing profession seems to have the wisdom to take Winston Churchill’s advice to heart, and is not wasting this unique moment. War and crises have always created momentum for innovation. During the pandemic some of the world’s greatest brands have adopted implicit methods. A new wave of marketing thinking, rooted in neuroscience, starts to clarify the opaque relation between what brands broadcast and how the consumer responds — even on the deepest brain levels.
These methods generally lower some of the risks of marketing and result in a higher campaign predictability — which is exactly what brands need in these troubled times.
There is light at the end of the tunnel.