Subliminal (meaning below your conscious threshold) advertising is a hugely popular method of reaching the subconscious, and we are exposed to hundreds of thousands of subliminal messages each year. Studies exploring subliminal perception show clearly how they influence subconscious processing and action.
In one study, two groups of students were shown two different but similar pictures of trees. One group saw a picture only of the trees. The others saw the second image, which was doctored to also contain an artfully concealed duck. After studying their image, each group was asked to draw a nature scene and to label it. The group who had studied the trees that contained the subliminal duck image drew more ducks and related imagery, such as feathers, birds and water, as compared to the other group, who had studied the un-doctored image.
In another study, published in 1984 in the Journal of Advertising, researchers gathered two groups of participants, one shown advertisements with no subliminal images and the other shown advertisements containing sexually subliminal messages…
The first doctored ad was for Marlborough Lights cigarettes, and it showed cowboys on horseback riding through rocky terrain. Subtly blended into the rocks was an image of a penis (yes, a penis).
The second ad was for Chivas Regal Whisky, and in the bottle a designer had skilfully and subtly blended the image of the back of a nude woman. Everyone in the study was hooked up to monitoring equipment, such as machines that recorded galvanic skin response, which measures stress levels and arousal through the electrical conductivity levels of their skin. Your skin conductivity will react even to subconscious arousal, which is part of the principle on which lie detector tests are based. Each group looked that the ads (one group the un-doctored ads, the other group the ads containing the subliminal images) for only 30 seconds. The result was that the arousal response of the group who saw the advertisements containing the subliminal sexual images was 20% higher than for the group who saw the advertisements without the subliminal messages.
Why do advertisers go to such lengths in their advertising?
Because a stronger emotional subconscious association between an image and a brand/product causes millions of us to make purchasing choices for those products, choices we might not otherwise have made if we had been considering only price, quality and other more independent and impartial factors. Subliminal advertising can be very sneaky—and potentially manipulative—which is why many countries now ban many forms of subliminal advertising.
Our consumer habits are a gold mind for researchers of subconscious action and motivation. Ask yourself why you are loyal to certain brands of products.
You might think it is because you are a savvy shopper and are choosing on quality or price. But, like most people, a huge percentage of your decision-making and brand loyalty is based on emotional subconscious thinking. Some of the reasons you are drawn to one product—or like their advertising—over another are subtle indeed.
For example, in a study done to explore sincerity in advertising, researchers found that consumers unconsciously prefer advertisements where the models have characteristics of infants and that contain baby animals or human babies. This preference for the physical characteristics of infants or childhood anatomy, especially faces, is known as neotony. Neotonous characteristics include round eyes and high foreheads, characteristics that are believed to unconsciously trigger positive thoughts and feelings of sincerity, naïveté, innocence and honesty. Unsurprisingly, the consumers questioned were not consciously aware of the effect of neotony on their choices.
