For my Advanced Psychology Lab final project we were allowed to pick a topic of our choice to run an experiment. My partner and I decided to delve into the surprisingly untouched subject of subliminal advertising.
As any psychology project, we began with initial research. Much to our suprise and chagrin, there is not much out there in terms of experimental research. This could be both because no significant findings have been reported or because there simply haven't been many studies exploring the topic.
Since the famous market researcher Vicary screwed up in 1957 by prematurely claiming that subliminal priming of "Thirsty? Drink Coca-Cola!" in the film Picnic spiked concession sales, the government has been adamantly against what they claim is public deception. However, even Vicary himself admitted that his study was not nearly sufficient to make the claim that the subliminal prime caused the spike in concession sales or that it made any i
mpression on the audience at all.Since then, the most common form of subliminal advertising that remains is embedded images. The most known company for doing this is Marlboro, placing phallic imagery in most of their rough and rugged cowboy advertising campaigns.
They bypass government regulation by entering a gray area in which the advertisers can claim they were unaware of that there was any sort of imagery. But the question remains - does it work?
We attempted to control for brand preference and product preference by creating our own ads. Granted, they were pretty lame ads, but the simpler it was the less chance of confounding.
Beer A has the word "SEX" in lighter lettering at the top of the bottle and in darker lettering at the base of the bottle. None of the participants were aware of the subliminal prime before we pointed it out to them.After spending 5 seconds examining each advertisement we administered a questionnaire with questions measuring brand preference.
We we forced to use convenience sampling methods to obtain our data, which led to a large age variability: 13-61. In this sample we found no significant results of brand preference.
However, when we limited our sample to participants over 21 years old, we found that they significantly prefered the beer with the subliminal prime (we controlled for primacy and recency effects by changing the order/name).
These results are also preliminary. Future research on a larger scale would be needed to confirm our findings.
This paper did lead me to question the psyhological nature of advertisement. I believe they should go hand in hand. Take banner ads for example: yeah the click through rate may be shitty, but in some way the brain does process the information of the banner ad on the page even if not consciously. What effects does this have on branding?
Remember the mere exposure effect: simply by exposing a person to a certain stimuli will breed familiarity which leads to greater liking for the stimuli. So if we bombard people with images of a CPG brand on their banners will they subconsciously become familiar and later prefer the brand when choosing in the store?
I hope that in the future I will have the opportunity to explore these important topics further.
