The essence of marketing is to try and bring out the most attractive elements of a product or service in order to promote it to people who might be interested.

To that end, a cafe might make its window display look attractive, or play music that people might enjoy while there. And one of the key things they might do is to dress up the contents of what they’re offering with a fancy sounding menu and attractive descriptions of the food.

But in reality, on a hot day, nothing a cafe can do to attract customers will work better than if they put up a sign saying ‘free ice cream’.

And that’s fundamentally one of the issues we have with clinical trials. Making the ‘product’ itself more attractive – namely through reducing the burden of taking part – would be the single most effective thing we could do to attract more participants.