Subliminal Messages
Before discussing the use, and implications of the use, of subliminal messages in the advertising industry, it is important to give a brief outline of what it is we understand to be a subliminal message.
Liminal is a scientific name for the smallest detectable sensation. A subliminal message then, is a message hidden in another subject created to be registered by the brain without the person addressed realising it. It is believed that one can influence behaviour by appealing to the subconscious mind with words and images that can pass below the limits of perception. If this is true, subliminal messages could provide an invaluable tool for advertisers to manipulate consumer’s behaviour by hiding subliminal messages in their adverts.
In this essay-website I will outline the known uses of subliminal messages in advertising today and provide a brief summary of the scientific theories that support the strength of subliminal messages.
Subliminal studies date from 1898, but only in 1957 were they first studied as an advertising tool by James Vicary, an advertising promoter. In a New Jersey Cinema he claimed to have increased popcorn sales by 58%, and Coke sales by 18%, simply by flashing very briefly the messages "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry - Eat Popcorn" during a film. The most well known techniques are Backmasking (a sound in backwards recorded into a track), Reverse Speech,
Flashing Images(click and watch example), and Pareidolia (images inside images, like faces in clouds).
From 1957 to 2006, many companies used subliminal techniques to influence consumer’s behaviour, but no scientific proof that these messages had such power was ever given. The subject was for many years treated as a hoax. This is illustrated by in an article by Todd I. Stark (1999), a psychologist and science writer from Drexel University in Philadelphia, who wrote that; “The experimental subliminal effects themselves are weak and usually relatively temporary”. Stark’s thoughts were supported by many researches such as Charles Eriksen who carried out many experiments and found several weaknesses in the concept of subliminal perception. The idea of a hoax became even stronger when Vicary later declared his “Drink Coca-cola” projector was a very weak influence technique.
However, Stark’s article is not entirely convincing in its dismissal of the strength of subliminal messages, as he later states that it “can be used as part of a larger strategy of effective influence”. We see this rather different position repeated in the study of Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), a book that became required reading for a generation of college students. He argues that “The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry […] and subliminal advertising is a strong weapon in the new advertising age”. In 2003, 300 billion dollars were spent in advertising, and a billion dollars were spent on what the marketers call the “motivation analysis” or “symbol manipulation” studies. Louis Cheskin, a scientist and psychologist who had an extremely successful marketing consultancy based on manipulation of symbols studies summed up what these studies are in the following terms:
Motivation research is the type of research that seeks to learn what motivates people in making choices. It employs techniques designed to reach the unconscious or subconscious mind because preferences are generally determined by factors of which the individual is not conscious…Actually in the buying situation the consumer generally acts emotionally and compulsively, unconsciously reacting to the images and designs, which in the subconscious are associated with the product. (Packard, 1957, p.14)