I mostly agree and am anxious to read your coming piece about Bernay’s manufatcuring of consent…

What seems to lack in both yours and Heather’s positions, is the aknowledgement of the impressive social and value change which has in these last years happened to widen the always existing, but realistically copable with from a professional perspective, between a person’s opinions and behaviours over many issues which concern us when we operate.

In my view, since the late nineties this change has dramatically accellerated.
I remember I would reassure my clients that if they gave me a reasonable position, allowed me to do my homework properly, supplied sufficient human and financial resources I would be almost certain to modify a specific public’s opinion on an issue and that these modified opinions would turn into actual behaviours. To the point that I would tie a part of my fee to the realization of that outcome.

Today the situation is very different indeed.
Publics are much more fragmented, points of reference, ideologies, political parties, clubs, institutions of all sorts (pruvate and public) have lost much of their influence power over indviduals. These become publics only for specific moments and on specific issues and then become other publics who have different opinions on the same issue.

My favourite example is the issue of sustainable mobiity.
If you interview an individual when he drives to the city in the early morning, when he takes the subway to move around town, when he walks to his neraby restaurant for a snack, when he bicycles or motorbykes in the contryside during the weekend, you will receive different answers to the same question.

The implications of this are many, and some have very much to do with the need of a serious effort on our side to transit our professional platform from a moslty listening of stakeholder opinions exercise to a stronger observing and understanding of behaviours of those stakeholders.
Of course, only after we have adequately assessed that my observations have factual reality (and this again we can only assess by registering opinions and by observin behaviours).

Imagine the day in which your client/employer asks you:
I don’t think that opinions have any intense correlation with opinions any longer.
My research suppliers are telling me that they are feverishly working on more effective and less expensive ways of observing behaviours.
What are you doing to make sure that the funds we invest in public relations actually affect behaviours?

Likewise it seems comforting to governments, businesses, and others who wish to persuade the public(s), that they can somehow predict and influence outcomes. There are some aspects of human psychology that can generally be applied by PR practitioners.

But is it really feasible to derive persuasive campaigns based on knowledge that a part of our brain shows a neural response when we see something we like (for example).

Like you, I am cynical that the science of our minds is so simple that it can be readily manipulated, especially by politicians or marketers. Celebrities might be credible sources for some people – but not everyone and not for everything for the person who might buy a magazine on the basis of the celeb being on the cover.

Humans may well be the output of our neurology and biology, etc, but as everyone is more different than they are similar, I doubt more than general likelihoods would emerge from modern scientific research.

Just as there are some predictions you can make about the Deal or No Deal boxes based on mathemtical probabilities (eg trends towards the average).