Subliminal marketing

The latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have possibly been the most modernising eras in human history. The renaissance and the industrial revolution were separated by centuries. The steam engine was quickly followed by the internal combustion engine. The analog age hadn’t even arrived when it was swept past by the digital age. It was an era of change and rapid change at that. If the previous century is anything to go by, we can expect many more revolutions.
Everything we have come to know from the kettle to the newspaper has undergone some form of transformation and has with this change ushered in the modern age. In this period we saw many marvels and breakthroughs that have influenced our lives. But the modern age was not only characterised by technological wonders, it represents many more things, especially epitomising the consumer.
The ‘consumer age’ dawned upon mankind with the first supermarket and television advertisement. Consumers were almost inundated with variety and options. They had hundreds of brands to choose from, and thousands of advertisements bombarding them everyday, telling them what to buy, why to buy this and why not to buy that. Brands became global thanks to satellite communication and the internet. They became pervasive. Anywhere you went, a major brand was either sure to follow or already be there. Global brands are not just name sake, they actually are worldwide.
With so many brands and with such a presence, organisations need to etch out their own niche and differentiate themselves from the rest. A brand nowadays is not just a product but is a sum of many parts; its marketing, its selling, etc. To many a product is only as good as its advertisement. Producers have now turned towards advertising, marketing and publicity to constantly remind consumers of their presence and influence purchase decisions. It is this concept of ‘influencing’ that we wish to delve deeper into. Advertising has always meant two things for a company; presence and persuasion. Presence; to tell the consumer that so and so brand is selling at such and such place or that the brand has launched a new product. Persuasion is to win over the customer, to get them to buy the product over others’. This is what advertising is. Mass media has allowed it to flourish. In newspapers, on televisions, on radios, on the internet and even as far fetched as messages in the sky, advertising is now a greatly contributing factor to organisational success.
But to what lengths must it go to achieve this? Many have mulled over the ethics of advertising and discussed the means that are employed. Seemingly innocuous practices like race-specific ads have invited criticism but less benign methods lurk in the background.
On September 12, 1957, a market researcher named James M. Vicary called a press conference to announce the formation of a new corporation, the Subliminal Projection Company, formed to exploit what Vicary called a major breakthrough in advertising: subliminal stimuli. Vicary described the results of a six-week test conducted in a New Jersey movie theatre, in which a high speed projector was used to flash the slogans “drink coke” and “eat popcorn” over the film for 1/3,000 of a second at five-second intervals. According to Vicary’s storehouse, popcorn sales went up 57.5 per cent over the six weeks; cokes sales were up 18.1 per cent.
The incident mentioned above was the first one ever reported where subliminal advertising was used. Subliminal messages are defined as:
A signal or message embedded in another object, designed to pass below normal limits of perception. These messages are indiscernible by the conscious mind, but in certain situations can affect the subconscious or deeper mind and later actions or attitudes. The term in itself stands for ‘beneath a limen’; a ‘limen’ being a sensory threshold.
The question that next comes to mind is whether Subliminal Marketing is an ethical practice or not, since it influences the minds of the consumers without them being aware of this ‘hidden’ force.

The writer is a business administration professional and has done extensive research on subliminal marketing. He can be contacted at [email protected]