Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice☆
Introduction
Subliminal advertising became notorious in 1957 through the publicity surrounding James Vicary, a private market researcher, who claimed to have substantially increased sales of Coca Cola and popcorn in a movie theatre, by secretly and subliminally flashing the message “Drink Coca Cola” and “Eat popcorn.” Nobody has replicated Vicary’s findings; his study has never been published and appears to have been a publicity hoax (Pratkanis, 1992). In the present article, we argue that Vicary’s fantasies do have some basis of reality. We argue that subliminally priming a brand name for a drink can increase the likelihood that participants will choose that drink, given the opportunity to do so. But importantly, as we will argue and demonstrate, priming of a brand name for a drink will only affect choice behavior of people who are thirsty (i.e., have a goal to drink) and not of people who are not thirsty.
It is one of the great paradoxes that, even though the idea of being manipulated without one’s awareness has been so abhorrent to people that subliminal advertising has been legally banned in Australia, Britain, and the United States, American consumers appear to spend more than $50 million annually on self-help audiotapes that contain subliminal messages (Pratkanis & Aronson, 2001). The industry flourishes, even though scientific testing of such tapes in areas of self esteem (Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pratkanis, & Eskenazy, 1991), memory improvement (Audley et al., 1991, Greenwald et al., 1991), and weight loss (Merikle & Skanes, 1992), failed to find evidence for the effectiveness of these subliminal suggestions (for an overview, see Brannon & Brock, 1994; for an overview of earlier studies that also failed to find evidence for the influence of subliminal messages, see Moore, 1982, Moore, 1988).
However, that these subliminal messages were ineffective is hardly surprising. For instance, some of the subliminal messages contained entire sentences (e.g., “I have high self-worth and high self-esteem”). To be processed, subliminal verbal primes have to consist of one or perhaps two (very short) words and not of whole sentences. Furthermore, priming merely increases the accessibility of the primed (as well as of related) concepts and is therefore unlikely to improve our memory or our self-concept (Greenwald, 1992).
What about brand choices? Unlike self-improvement messages, short brand names can be primed subliminally. So far, however, only a few studies assessed the impact of subliminal priming of a brand name on motivation or brand choice. One of these studies has been conducted by Cooper and Cooper (2002), who subliminally primed participants with pictures of Coca Cola cans and the word “thirsty.” This research revealed that the priming manipulation had a positive effect on self-rated thirst. A study examining a specific effect of subliminally primed drinks, albeit an unsuccessful one, has been conducted by Dijksterhuis, Wegner, and Aarts (reported in Dijksterhuis, Aarts, & Smith, 2005). Participants were either subliminally primed with the word “drink” or with the word “cola” as compared to neutral words. Afterwards, they were offered a drink and given a choice between cola and mineral water. Although respondents in the experimental conditions drank substantially more than those in the control condition, the cola prime did not affect participants’ choice of beverage. An early study by Hawkins (1970) also failed to find an effect of subliminal primes of a brand on participants’ choices (see also Beatty & Hawkins, 1989).
This pattern of findings is rather discouraging. However, we believe that these studies neglected a crucial condition for subliminal priming of a brand of drink to affect choice behavior, namely that the presence of the motivation to drink (i.e., being thirsty) is essential for subliminal priming of a brand of drink to be effective. This proposition is based on recent theorizing and empirical findings by Strahan et al., 2002, Strahan et al., 2005. They argued that subliminal priming will only affect people’s behavior if the subliminal prime is goal-relevant, and people are motivated to pursue the goal. They demonstrated that people who were thirsty (as compared to people who were not thirsty) were more likely to drink a beverage, and evaluated a thirst-quenching beverage as more positive, after they had been primed with thirst-related cognitions (e.g., thirst, dry). Thus, these findings suggest that subliminal primes will affect a person’s behavior mainly if the prime is relevant to the current goal of the person.
However, these studies have not addressed the crucial issue of whether subliminal exposure to a brand name can positively affect people’s choices for that particular brand. Based on the general reasoning that the primed concept (i.e., a brand of drink) should be consistent with the individuals’ motivation to attain a goal (i.e., quenching one’s thirst) to influence goal-directed actions (i.e., choosing a drink), we expect that priming of a brand of drink will affect choice behavior mainly for people who are thirsty. For instance, if a person is not thirsty, it is unlikely that subliminal exposure to Lipton Ice will motivate that person to go to a vending machine, and choose a Lipton Ice. In contrast, a thirsty person, who may already have been contemplating getting a drink, should be more likely to choose a (thirst-quenching) beverage that (due to priming) is highly accessible than one that is less accessible (for similar reasoning, see Moskowitz, 2005). This reasoning is also in line with the work by Bargh and colleagues (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), who argue that trait priming can affect behavior, but only when a person is in the right context to which the trait is applicable (Higgins, 1996). For example, a person primed with the concept of rudeness will only behave rudely if he or she has the opportunity to do so, and if the behavior is applicable to the situation (e.g., when the experimenter neglects the participant when she is coming to collect her money; Bargh et al., 1996; Study 1). Likewise, priming a brand of drink will only be effective when applicable to the situation. That is, only a thirsty person who is choosing a drink will be affected by the prime.
In testing the prediction that priming a particular brand of drink will positively influence a thirsty person’s choice for, and intention to, drink that particular brand, we try not only to enhance our understanding of subliminal advertisement, we also want to extend theoretically the findings of Strahan and colleagues in at least one other important way. Their research has shown that priming of the goal (e.g., quenching one’s thirst) seems to amplify one’s actions (e.g., drinking) to accomplish the goal. In the present research, participants are not primed with the specific goal, but rather with a means to accomplish the goal. That is, a thirst-quenching brand of drink could be considered as a means by which one could accomplish one’s goal (reduce one’s thirst). People often have multiple means available to reach a particular goal, and we hypothesize that they will be more likely to select the means that is highly accessible at the moment of attempting to attain that goal.
We report two studies which tested our general hypothesis. In both experiments, thirsty and non-thirsty participants were subliminally exposed to either “Lipton Ice” (a brand of ice tea) or a neutral word, after which choice for, and intention to, drink that brand were measured. We had several theoretical reasons to choose Lipton Ice as a prime. First, that the primed brand is perceived as thirst-quenching seems to be an essential requirement for the success of priming. For example, thirsty individuals, who have been primed subliminally with Coca Cola, are unlikely to want to drink Coke if they think of it as a sweet drink that increases rather than decreases thirst. A second condition would be that participants are not habitual drinkers of the brand to be primed. For example, the ideal Coca Cola customer, who drinks Coke whenever he or she is thirsty, is unlikely to be affected by subliminal exposure to “Coca Cola”: he or she will always choose a Coca Cola irrespective of being primed with Coca Cola (i.e., a ‘ceiling-effect’).
To avoid these pitfalls, we conducted a pretest to select a brand of drink, which participants would consider thirst-quenching, but which, at the same time, was generally not the habitual choice for our participants. The pretest, in which participants were asked to indicate how often they drank a number of beverages, and to indicate the extent to which they considered each beverage thirst-quenching, revealed that Lipton Ice best met these conditions.
Section snippets
Study 1
Participants in Study 1 were subliminally primed with Lipton Ice or a control word, after which they chose between Lipton Ice and another beverage (Spa Rood), and indicated their intentions to drink Lipton Ice. Level of thirst was measured with a self-report scale.
Study 2
Study 2 was designed to extend and complement the findings of Study 1. First, because Study 1 was the first study that demonstrates the positive influence of subliminal brand primes on people’s choices, we wanted to replicate the findings. Second, and more importantly, in Study 2 we manipulated (and not simply measured) level of thirst of our participants. In this manner, we could exclude the possibility that the positive association between self-reported thirst and likelihood to choose Lipton
General discussion
The present findings demonstrate that subliminal advertising could be feasible—an idea that has been debated for many years, but so far has lacked empirical support. Our studies suggest that exposing individuals subliminally to the brand name of a drink increases the probability that they will choose this drink, provided that they are thirsty. Both studies showed that subliminally exposing our participants to the brand name “Lipton Ice” increased choice for, and intention to, drink Lipton Ice
Acknowledgments
We thank Esther Papies for her helpful comments on a draft of this article. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments.
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The present research was partly funded by a research grant (VENI-Grant, No. 451-04-104) from the Dutch Association of Scientific Research (NWO), awarded to the first author.