Most of us are exposed to more than 5000 marketing messages every day. Whilst we may not think we are paying much attention to advertisements or commercials, our subconscious attention takes in the message, especially since advertisers design their campaigns to emotionally influence the subconscious in a fleeting instant, with colour, words, images and music.
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.
If you are in doubt about the power of below-conscious-awareness perception, then try this exercise.
Look at Figure 5.3 below for two seconds, then turn your eyes away. Pay attention to how you feel as well as to what you notice.
Fig 5.3
If you are like most people, you noticed right away that the letter O is bold black.
Now look at Figure 5.4 for two seconds;
Fig 5.4
You probably noticed that the black bold letter is an E. But is that the only difference?
What you may not have noticed consciously, but many of you registered unconsciously, is that Figure 5.4 contains three provocative and emotionally charged words (one of which is even a largely forbidden word) in it: “FUCK”, “PAIN”, and “SEX”.
Figure 5.3, in contrast, contains the words “DUCK”, “RAIN” and “SOX”.
These images were used in an experiment, reported in the Journal of Psychology back in 1976, that sought to discern the power of subconscious information processing compared to conscious information processing.
Here’s how the study went and what it showed;
Students were divided into two groups: one group was shown the image in Figure 5-3 and the other group the image in Figure 5-4.
They were shown the images for a maximum of two seconds. They used a camera to monitor the students’ eye movements. (They found that those two seconds were enough time for student’s to scan the entire image.)
After the scan, they asked the students to look at an unrelated picture of an activity and to write about it, to describe what was going on in the picture, what might happen next according to the activity in the picture and so on.
Amazingly, the students who had seen the image Figure 5-4, the letter grid containing the hidden provocative words, were heavily influenced in their writing by the emotions of those words, as compared to the group who had scanned the image containing the emotionally neutral words. The stories of the first group contained more conflict, loss, uncertainty and violence, and they used more unpleasant language as compared to the language of the other group.
This result strongly suggests that at the subconscious level, the students who had seen the provocative words at a subliminal level were later emotionally reacting to them while engaged in a situation that was not in any way related (writing about a picture showing some mundane activity).
They were not consciously aware that they had been influenced, but it showed up clearly in the stories they wrote.
Advertisers and others, from parents to politicians, rely on such subconscious tendencies to exert their influence. All of us are subject to such subconscious influence, and it is worth remembering this not only for ourselves but also for our children, who are exposed to extraordinary levels of media, especially violent media, such as television shows and movies and even video games.
We can’t really know how much the subliminal effect of the content carries over into their everyday, conscious lives. Here are several more example of ways consumers are influenced by subconscious programming:
• Identical products sell many more units if priced at £9.99 than £10.00. At a conscious level, the one penny difference is no big savings, but subconsciously it is thought to be a far better deal and an attractive savings.
• Consumers familiar with both a generic brand and a well-known brand of an over-the-counter medication insisted that they knew the two brands were identical except for price.
Bizarrely, when they needed the products because they had severe symptoms the products would help ease, the same number of these consumers chose the higher priced product. Even more interesting is that if the medication was for a loved one, such as a child or spouse, purchasers nearly always chose the more expensive well-known brand instead of the generic, lower priced one.
Subconsciously, these buyers had been programmed to make a strong association between the name recognition of the higher priced brand with the feeling that it was more effective. Psychologically speaking, another factor that is people do not want to feel they are scrimping when it comes to caring for loved ones, so they buy the premium product.
• Blind taste tests (where the drinkers did not know the names of the brands) of two beverages showed that consumers preferred Beverage B to Beverage A. However, when the same products were tested with the brands not hidden, the participants preferred Beverage A, which was a well-known brand, in significant numbers over Beverage B, which was a generic brand.
This research showed the power of perception over taste buds!
The media are masters of subconscious programming. They are so good, as a matter of fact, that most people do not believe they are influenced by it.
Images used with kind permission from – Matrix designs: From The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Advertising by August Bullock, Norwich Publishers, 2004. TheSecretSalesPitch. com. Reffering to the original study: Somekh, D.E. (1976). The effect of embedded words in a brief visual display. British Journal of Psychology. 67(4): pg. 529-535.)
