Contemporary Advertising 14th Edition by William Arens ,Michael Weigold ,Christian Arens

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Imagine you could inject an ad message directly into people's minds, bypassing ordinary perception. Consumers would be unable to challenge or ignore your communication, because they would never notice it in the first place.
Incredibly, in 1957 James Vicary claimed he had such a technique. The market researcher said that during a movie he had flashed the phrases "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry Eat popcorn" sublimi-nally (shown the words so quickly people could not detect them). In response, he claimed, sales of popcorn and Coke shot up by 18 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
As psychologist Anthony Pratkanis notes, "people were outraged and frightened by a technique so devilish that it could bypass their conscious intellect and beam subliminal commands directly to their subconscious." Great Britain and Australia subsequently banned subliminal advertising and the FCC threatened to revoke the license of any TV station that showed subliminal ads.
Public concern abated when Vicary could not reproduce his effects under supervised tests. He later admitted making them up. But fascination with subliminal advertising reappeared in the early 70s when Wilson Bryan Key published books that claimed to find the word sex in hundreds of ads, seeing them in ice cubes from a gin ad and on the surface of a Ritz cracker! And while almost nobody else could see these "embeds," Key sold plenty of books.
Truth is, not one proven instance where an advertiser has used a subliminal message exists. In fact, doesn't the whole idea seem pretty ridiculous How can you be influenced by a message that you can't detect To act on a communication you must understand it, and to understand it you must see it. But the idea of a subliminal message is that you can't see it (otherwise it isn't subliminal). Case closed.
Well, not quite. It helps to separate subliminal advertising (demonstrating that a real advertiser has affected product sales with a hidden message embedded in a commercial) from subliminal influence (demonstrating that people can be affected by a hidden message). Current evidence is conclusive: People can be influenced subliminally.
Demonstrating subliminal influence requires a couple of things. First, you have to present the message (a picture, word, or phrase) so quickly that people can't tell it was there. Psychologists say that something shown for 120 milliseconds (0.12 of a second) or less is undetectable. Second, it has to be proven that the message influences people in some way For example, a group shown a subliminal message must do something different from a control group that doesn't get the subliminal message.
Dozens of credible research studies have now reported such demonstrations. Consider just one example: A group of researchers wondered what would happen if people who are snake phobic are subliminally presented with a picture of a snake. Phobics typically begin sweating and become anxious when they see a snake photograph, whereas most people are fine. So what happens if snake photos are presented subliminally The researchers found that even though subjects could not "see" the snake pictures, they responded as if they could: Phobics were anxious, nonpho-bics were not. So much for the idea that we are immune to messages we can't detect.
But snakes and phobias are far removed from the concerns of most advertisers. Advertisers want to influence buying behaviors, not fears. Which brings us to research done by three business professors, Yael Zemack-Rugar, James Bettman, and Gavan Fitzimons. In an ingenious experiment, they subliminally presented words related to either sadness or guilt to study participants. Both sadness words (i.e., sad, miserable ) and guilt words ( guilty, blame worthy ) describe bad feelings. But people act differently when they feel sad as opposed to when they feel guilty. Sad people look for rewards to cheer themselves up, but guilty people deny themselves rewards. So the researchers predicted that in response to subliminal presentation of guilt words, guilt-prone people (as opposed to non-guilt prone people) would be less likely to buy themselves an indulgence. Conversely in response to sad words, guilt-prone people as compared with others would be just as likely to buy an indulgence. In fact, their experiments demonstrated these patterns of results. By subliminally influencing specific emotions, the researchers influenced purchase behaviors.
An even more direct demonstration that subliminal advertising an work comes from a study done by psychologists Johan Karre-mans, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Jaspar Claus. They argued that ubliminal advertising influences brand preference only when someone is motivated to buy in the first place. In their experiment, people tracked strings of letters on a computer screen. Unbeknownst to the participants, subliminal messages were being lashed every so often. Half of the participants were exposed to the subliminal message "Lipton Ice," and half were exposed to a control word. Later, in a supposedly unrelated second study, participants were asked both how thirsty they were and whether they referred Lipton or a competing brand. The results: When subjects were not thirsty the two groups showed the same preference for Lipton. But thirsty participants showed a different pattern: Those xposed to the Lipton subliminal message showed a strong preference for Lipton; those in the control group did not. The authors' xplanation: Motivation plus subliminal prime equals increased reference for the primed brand.
Taken together, these studies and many others show conclusively that we can be affected by messages presented outside of awareness. Score one for Vicary But it is a long way from saying this can be done to showing that it is done. In fact, as stated earlier, o one has ever shown that an ad campaign has used subliminal stimuli. And no research backs up Key's claims about "embeds" in print ads.
But can we be sure that no advertiser ever used subliminal advertising Proving that something has never happened is pretty difficult (can you prove that Aunt Lois wasn't really abducted by
aliens while she walked home from school back in 1975?). But the risks an advertiser would court by using a subliminal message far outweigh the likely rewards. What would consumers think of a company that was caught using subliminal ads What would the legal repercussions be Moreover, why would a company choose subliminal advertising when the nonsubliminal type can work so well?
People seem both repelled and attracted by the thought that they can be influenced below the threshold of awareness. It seems to imply a hidden power and dovetails nicely with a universal interest in the idea that not everything is what it seems. Interest in the phenomenon of subliminal advertising won't be going away soon. Especially now that we know it CAN work.
How does subliminal advertising relate to the free-market principle of complete information we discussed earlier?