Drink coca-cola, eat popcorn, and choose powerade: testing the limits of subliminal persuasion
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Drink coca-cola, eat popcorn, and choose powerade: testing the limits of subliminal persuasion Laura Smarandescu & Terence A. Shimp
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Research by marketing/advertising scholars has yielded anything but definitive results when testing whether subliminal advertising is capable of persuading consumers. Recent research in social cognition has provided impressive evidence that subliminally priming brand names affects individuals’ attitudes, choices, and behaviors. In the spirit of replication and boundary-condition testing, we conducted three studies to examine whether subliminally priming brand names remains successful under more realistic marketplace conditions. Study 1 pits an underdog brand against a market share leader and demonstrates that subliminal priming significantly influences purchase intentions when consumers are in an active thirst state. Study 2 examines the boundary conditions of this effect on brand choice in a simulated store environment and also obtains a significant priming effect when consumers are in an active thirst state. However, this effect is nullified in study 3 that is structurally parallel to study 2 but which adds a 15-min time delay between the prime and the choice task. The resultant null effect questions the ability of subliminal priming to persuade consumers under more realistic marketplace conditions. Keywords Subliminal advertising . Priming . Persuasion . Motivation . Replication . Boundary-condition testing
1 Introduction The interrelated topics of subliminal perception, subliminal persuasion, and subliminal advertising have long intrigued, provoked, and concerned all parties interested in advertising and its impact—practitioners, the general public, policy makers, and scholars. By way of distinction, subliminal perception refers to the awareness of stimuli
L. Smarandescu (*) Iowa State University, 2350 Gerdin Building, Ames, IA 50011, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Shimp Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
Mark Lett
presented at a speed or visual level that is below the conscious threshold, whereas subliminal persuasion necessitates that the subliminally presented stimuli have some effect on individuals’ attitudes or behaviors (Epley et al. 1999). Subliminal persuasion and its advertising counterpart are of great concern given the chilling implication that consumer behavior could be influenced surreptitiously. The original outcry occurred over 50 years ago in response to a researcher, James Vicary, who claimed to have increased the sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn in a New Jersey movie theater by using the subliminal message: “Drink Coca-Cola, and Hungry? Eat popcorn.” (Block and Vanden Bergh 1985). This message was supposedly flashed for 1/3,000 of a second at 5-s intervals. Though Vicary’s research is scientifically meaningless (he failed to use proper experimental procedures), the topic of subliminal persuasion has since fostered considerable scholarly research. Marke
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