Birmingham researchers launch study on Britain’s Behaviours

I'm posting this on behalf of Nick Lee, who is this year's Joseph Lister Award winner at the British Science Festival, which takes place in September.

Nick is running a mass participation event, which I thought might be of interest to Methodspace members:

Scientists from Aston University in Birmingham are launching a new study of Britain’s behaviours, investigating the influence of advertising on our decision to go through with a transaction.

As the saying goes; ‘I know half the money that I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half’.

Huge amounts are spent on advertising each year, yet we have surprisingly little concrete information about exactly what features of advertising influence individual behaviour, and more importantly, how.

So the big question is; does advertising simply provide information to the individual to allow them to make up their own mind, or can the advertiser help this process along?

The study ‘Adlab’ is designed to give up some information on this question which goes far beyond what we think we know now about advertising in many ways.

It is a short and simple experiment designed to compare different types of advertisement, and their influence on our attitudes and behaviours.

The study, ‘Neuromantics’, takes you to the ‘Adlab’ where we will be investigating what it is about a particular advertisement that appeals to different types of people – are some more influenced by celebrity? Or the scientific argument? Or the beauty of the person seen in the ad?

The experiment aims to understand more about how humans interpret different types of information and whether or not this can lead to behaviour change – as well as how the process may work.

Adlab is the brainchild of the co-editor of the European Journal of Marketing, Prof. Nick Lee, and a leading cognitive neuroscientist, Dr Carl Senior, both from Aston University in Birmingham.

Dr Nick Lee Said; "Adlab is an exciting attempt to understand how advertising works, but also more importantly how we react to different types of messages - in particular whether we do it rationally or not. However, in order to draw any firm conclusions, we need a huge amount of people to take part - the more opinions we have, the more confident we are about our findings. The study is really short, and might even be a little bit of fun! So please do take part, we really value it!"