Effort Isn’t Equal. Neither Is Response.
78% of people in Mole Valley are active, compared to just 46% in Blackpool. That’s a 70% difference in likelihood, driven not by effort, but environment. Not because you care more. Not because you try harder. But because the system around you makes it easier. Environments shape effort. Structures shape behaviour. And effort, it turns out, is not equally distributed.
Sport England’s latest Active Lives Adult Survey (Nov 2023–24) shows clear recovery since the pandemic. More people are active, volunteering is slowly returning to those levels and cycling is seeing a well deserved decline in favour of running, swimming and team sports.
But beneath the surface a more pressing truth is emerging. Its one that matters deeply: as participation has risen, so too has inequality.
The most affluent now enjoy a 20 percentage point lead in activity levels over the least affluent. Adults with long-term health conditions are still half as likely to meet muscle strength guidelines. And adults with two or more characteristics of inequality are 30 percentage points less likely to be active than those with none.
This isn’t just a public health story. It’s a systemic behavioural one—about how structure shapes who can act, and who gets left behind.
Celebrating Active Communities
Before we move deeper, it’s worth recognising that the work of Sport England deserves real celebration, its an extraordinary ongoing achievement. Building more active communities isn’t just good for individual wellbeing—it creates healthier, more resilient, and economically stronger societies. Increased activity reduces burden on the NHS, boosts productivity, and contributes to a thriving economy.
This achievement is a perfect example of what happens when we plan to, understand and optimise powerful results within a complicated system.
Not Just Willing—But Able
A few weeks ago, I ran the London Landmarks Half Marathon. I have HSD, so running is painful and rarely graceful. But I ran with an incredibly supportive group of colleagues who helped me keep going when my body wanted to stop. The outcome might have looked individual, but it wasn't. I was the beneficiary of a number of positive conditions that made the effort possible, and sustainable.
It was a vivid reminder that action isn’t just about willpower. It’s also about structure; the scaffolding that makes effort possible. Sport England understand this too. Their work doesn’t just track activity; it recognises the behavioural patterns that shape it. At the heart of their approach is a simple but powerful model: Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation (COM-B). All three are required for behaviour to occur. Remove just one, and the outputs collapse.
This is why marketing funnels, performance metrics, and even approaches like marketing mix modelling—designed to find tidy averages—often miss the point. They assume that everyone travels the same path, that behaviour is a clean progression from awareness to action. But the path is steeper for some than for others. The easiest wins dominate reporting dashboards, the audiences already primed to respond. We plan as if everyone is already in-market, already able, already active.
But if behaviour is unevenly distributed, then opportunity and capability by definition must be too.
This type of consideration is an instance where the private sector can significantly learn from the great campaigns of the public sector. In their recent Silver winning IPA paper the. The Government Communication Service (GCS); whose campaigns tackle everything from tax evasion to blood donation. Demonstrated how they fully embrace this type of thinking. Their behavioural activation framework explicitly accounts for structural, social, and emotional factors that influence response, not just awareness.
Rather than focusing solely on the immediate and the easily tracked, GCS campaigns are designed and evaluated around meaningful behavioural outcomes; delivering results that matter, not just what’s easily measurable.
Advertising to the Already Active
In advertising we spend lots of time talking about optimisation, but what we often optimise is ease. Premium audiences. High-response segments. Channels where tracking is simple. We build plans for the Mole Valleys of the media world, release beautiful and sensational case studies and wonder why Blackpool doesn’t convert.
But the real missed cost isn’t inefficient media buying. It’s invisible friction: the thousands of small obstacles that quietly prevent action long before a click or a conversion ever becomes measurable.
Government campaigns, tracked across over 700 case studies, reveal a truth marketers often overlook: behaviour change only happens when structural barriers are understood and removed. Trusted messengers, high-frequency exposure, culturally relevant formats—these aren’t tactical flourishes. They are the infrastructure of action, so easily lost in an industry too often in thrall to the false certainty of smoothed averages, hyperbolic certainty and meta analysis.
Advertising alone can’t fix a system full of friction. And the more we optimise dashboards around short-term response, the more we mistake visibility for effectiveness.
Marketing Isn’t Just Promotion
This is where the relationship between advertising and marketing matters, how we drive success through bridging disciplines rather than deeper focus.
Our reporting dashboards focus almost entirely on Promotion the visible P. We track impressions, clicks, ROAS, ROI. We optimise media placement, creative performance, cost-per-acquisition.
But friction lives across all the Ps.
Product: Can someone actually use it easily?
Price: Is it accessible, not just affordable?
Place: Is it available in moments that matter?
Promotion: Is the message even getting through, and to whom?
When we only address Promotion, we build brilliant-looking campaigns that bounce off invisible walls. True marketing reduces friction across the whole system. It builds conditions where action is easy, intuitive, possible.
Designing for Reality, Not for Reports
Imagine if we built marketing plans for people starting at the bottom of the hill, not those already at the top.
What if we optimised not just for recall or reach, but for reduced effort?
What if every segmentation considered capability and opportunity as core dimensions—not afterthoughts?
The best marketing wouldn’t just nudge people further along a supposed journey. It would rebuild the ground beneath their feet
Real Effectiveness
Sport England and the Government Communication Service are showing us a different model: One where action is supported, not just shouted at. Where success isn’t just a percentage on a report, but a systemic shift in who can move, act, and thrive.
Because real marketing effectiveness isn’t about moving audiences through a non-existent funnel. It’s about removing the barriers that stop them moving at all.
And let’s be clear: this isn’t a high-minded ideal. It’s a commercially proven path to growth.
Reducing friction across systems drives higher organic sales, strengthens pricing power, and improves margins. Brands that understand and remove the real barriers outperform those that simply optimise for ease.
Real sustained effectiveness isn’t just the ethical thing to pursue. It’s how stronger brands are built, how organic growth is unlocked, and how businesses create value that compounds over time.
It’s not just right. It’s smart.