Chapter II: Subliminal Advertising What is subliminal advertising?
If we descriptively summarise the term, we can say that it is a subliminal technique of
presenting consumers with subliminal stimuli via media used in marketing, with the
purpose of directly influencing consumers and their purchasing behaviour without them having conscious awareness of it (Trappey, 1996, p. 517). According to
Dijksterhuis, Aarts and Smith (2005), there is a possibility in subliminally affecting consumers’ choices. However, even though there is a good amount of evidence
supporting the effectiveness of the subliminal stimuli used in advertising, we cannot
declare for certain that subliminal advertising always works. Therefore, we should not
see this technique as a myth and ignore studying the subject further (Dijksterhuis, et al.,
2005). Moore (1982) states that there is no specific level of subliminal stimuli that
guarantees everyone in an audience to perceive a subliminal message. If the presented
stimulus levels are kept low, it would not affect the unconsciousness of people that have higher threshold limits. This does not mean that the application of subliminal
advertising would be always unrewarding as even if a very small amount of people were influenced by it, there would be an increase in sales of the presented product, or
whatever was aimed by the use of the subliminal messages (Moore, 1982, p. 41).
Since Vicary’s claims of influencing consumer choices using subliminal stimuli occurred, subliminal advertising became a controversial topic and many researches and
experiments have been done. Although no one was able to produce the results Vicary
claimed he did, there have been some evidence on the effectiveness of subliminal
advertisement produced. It is suggested that while it is possible to influence product
choices of consumers by subliminal stimuli, it occurs only when specific conditions are met (Verwijmeren, et al., 2011).
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