James Vicary Subliminal Messaging

Perception Without Awareness

Perception without awareness is the implanting of an idea without the subject being aware of it. An everyday example of this priming in action is when someone whistles a tune and then sometime later you start to whistle the same tune. A third party observing the two of you would see exactly what happened. But you remain oblivious to the way the tune entered your mind. You might not even remember your friend whistling it first.

In 1999 Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer Mckendrick of the University of Leicester staged a psychology experiment in a wine shop. They found that when French music was played in the shop 77% of the wine sold that day was French. When German music was played 73% of the wine sold on that day was German. The nationality of the music was changed on alternate days over a two week period. When questioned after their purchases 86% of the customers said categorically that the music did not affect their choice.

In a later experiment Dr North showed that music could also be used to significantly to prime the sense of taste. In this situation a wine tasting was held against a background of different types of music. Wine tasted against a background of powerful and heavy music was described as heavy. At the other extreme, wine tasted against a background of soft mellow music was described as mellow. The subject’s perception of taste had been unknowingly altered by the music they heard.

The extent to which people can be primed by the words they read has been shown by several experiments, notably one by Bargh, Chen and Burrows in 1996. Subjects studied sets of words and unscrambled them to make sentences. Half of the subjects had sentences with many words that related to stereotypes of old age: slow, wrinkled, feeble etc. The other subjects had neutral words. When they completed their scrambled sentence test walked down a corridor to deliver their paper. The subjects primed with words relating to old age, walked far slower along the corridor than their colleagues as if they had taken on an aspect of the words they were reading.

In this video we see an example of how PWA can influence peoples behavior in the setting of a shopping mall.

Since the late 1950’s governments around the world, including the US and UK, have banned subliminal advertising despite it being generally accepted that it doesn’t work. However research into the subject has continued and in 2007 Science Daily reported that researchers at University College, London had found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level.

Using MRI scans, the study explored whether an image which reaches the retina but you’re not aware of, has an impact on brain activity. In tests subjects’ brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it.

Dr Bahador Bahrami of UCL, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention — without us having the impression of having seen anything. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What our study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. I believe that it’s likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions — but that is just speculation at this point.”

These findings were similar to the results of research by Joel Voss and colleagues of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In this study subjects were shown 12 kaleidoscope images for 2 seconds each while they also performed an unrelated number task to distract them from consciously committing the images to memory.

When asked a minute later to look at pairs of similar-looking images and choose the one they had seen before the volunteers were 70% to 80% accurate. According to chance it should only be 50%.

The following video is a short part of a sales video made by a relatively well know internet marketing “guru” Frank Kern. Basically he is just driving around in his Porsche talking about how awesome his life is because he makes money online, creating desire in those watching to live the same sort of lifestyle by buying his course or becoming a member of his class. Now his courses are quite expensive, around 2-3k, however truth be told they are very helpful if you are just starting out. What’s interesting about it is the little hidden messages that he sneaks in, in a seemingly casual ride along conversation.

Though subliminal advertising may be banned in most countries we are still at the mercy of cunning marketers and merchandisers. Here’s a quick run through of some of the subtle tricks supermarkets use to part us from our cash.

BOGOF or Buy One Get One Free

Research showed that more than 50% of shoppers couldn’t resist a buy-one-get-one-free promotion. Great if you’re getting a bargain on something you really want but how many people get tempted into buying something they didn’t need let alone two of them?

Bait and Switch

The technique is to tempt the customer with a product at a low price, the bait, but then persuade them to buy an alternative higher priced product, the switch. It’s illegal to advertise a lower priced product that never existed but fine to replace with a higher cost alternative when the bargain? item has sold out or place a higher cost, better quality choice next to the cheaper option. It’s a general rule in sales that the volume of all products sold increases even though only a certain number are on offer.

Eye Level Is Buy Level

The items with the biggest profit tend to be in the line of sight of the customer. Cheaper items will be on the higher or lower shelves.

Stock Up Now!

The Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois found that promotions using multi-unit pricing such as three for $3, purchase suggestions such as “stock up for Easter”, or with purchase limits such as “limit three per customer” increased the amount consumers purchased. All three types of promotion increased purchase amounts by 30% to 105% over what consumers would normally plan on buying?.

These techniques are used by advertisers every day influencing our decisions to buy certain products over others, now if you have a website that you are using to make some sort of income, consider what you could be doing if you are thinking from this perspective? Simple banner animations to barely noticeable shades of font on the background of the page conveying messages, certain parts of the text in italics or in bold can be arranged to stand out from the rest with a specific message. The only limit to this is your creativity. And whether you are convinced this works or not is quite irrelevant because you have nothing to lose by adding some of these techniques to your business or website.