Abstract:

Since time immemorial, subliminal advertisement has continued to haunt the society and especially after James Vicary’s experiment at New Jersey, it reached a new height. Since then, there has been much argument about whether this can be an efficient technique of marketing communications. Decades of research has gone into establishing or abolishing this technique. But no satisfactory evidence, so far, has been provided by any researcher on either pole. While researches on subliminal advertisement are fewer in number, this study does a critical review of such available works and argues without any bias that subliminal advertising cannot be an effective tool to persuade the consumers to pursue any goal, as desired by the marketers. While the current study examines the proposed topic in the light of researches, it also deals with psychological aspects that prompt certain behavior. Such aspects deal with the role of mere exposure, threshold concepts and their subsequent effect on behavior. All these aspects have been given their theoretical treatments and their implications in research have been discussed. While asserting the central proposition, this study indicates both the theoretical and practical problems that do not make subliminal advertisements an effective tool of marketing. In the concluding part, this study points out the future research directions that can have desired results and can qualify itself as an alternative to traditional marketing practices.

Abstract

The prime objective of this paper is to shed light on incidental affect that the consumers experience while making a purchase decision, though unknowingly. Within psychology, to be specific, affect has received ample attention, with “Schimmack and Crites (2005) locating 923 references to affect between 1960 and 1980 and 4,170 between 1980 and 2000”(Cohen, Pham and Andrade, 2006). But, incidental affect has not been treated with due importance. The data in this study gathered from 60 respondents indicate that incidental affect plays a crucial role in framing the decision of the consumers and can be further explored as a new avenue of IMC. Researches on subliminal advertisements have been conducted, but that even failed to evoke satisfactory results, gathering mainly suspicion and criticism. Apart from that such studies have been conducted in laboratories mainly and such methods have been found to be tough to be tough to be implemented. Using this gap, the concerned study shows that incidental affect can be cultivated to bloom as a promising tool of future IMC.

pp 101–116  DOI: 10.1007/978-981-33-6374-8_6 

Abstract

Despite the growing interest among the scientific community regarding the power of subconscious, the current research did not find any evidence of its superiority over consciousness in generating positive consumer experience. This study shows that researches in subliminal messages have been set to work towards a set of pre-defined results and can only be used to generate some insignificant changes in social behaviour. Such behaviour is elicited only in laboratory conditions with specific situational variables. Interpretation of the existing corpus of the literature shows that subliminal messages can create negative experience which leads to hostile behaviour like derogatory comments on an African by an American citizen when the latter was primed with negative subliminal messages. Positive priming on the other hand showed weak presence in behaviour. However, research in the field of subliminal messages is required to inspect whether it is capable of improving mental health as indicated by few researches. Further exploration is required to prevent subliminal abuse. As indicated in the current study, subliminal messages when used in commercials are not capable of making a significant increase in sales figures when compared to supraliminal messages. Such messages and their wide-spread broadcast are not ethical because of the advertiser’s inclinations to use lascivious, disparaging or satanic stimuli which can lead to fatal outcomes like alleged suicide of a 10-year old boy. Positive experience or happiness is a subjective feeling and is generated by supraliminal messages which has been shown in the study to rely heavily on consciousness.