by professorpan » Thu Apr 27, 2006 6:54 pm
<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://physorg.com/news65283028.html">physorg.com/news65283028.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Subliminal advertising, which caused a scare in the 1950s and 60s before being written off as a stunt, may work after all, new research says.<br><br>US marketing entrepreneur James Vicary pioneered the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957, when he claimed movie-goers who were exposed to screen messages lasting only 0.003 of a second for Coca-Cola and popcorn then rushed to buy these products. <br><br>Scientists, though, failed to replicate his results and Vicary admitted in 1962 that his research was fabricated. <br><br>But by that time, outrage had prompted many countries to outlaw subconscious flashed messages on TV and in the cinema. <br><br>Now, though, University of Nijmegen researchers in the Netherlands have revisited subliminal advertising and discovered that, if conditions are right, it can successfully promote a brand, New Scientist says. <br><br>In a first study, the team asked 61 volunteers to perform a nonsense task -- counting a string of Bs on a screen -- while a 23-millisecond message flashed up. <br><br>One group received the words "Lipton Ice" for the iced tea brand, while the other, called the control group, received the meaningless words "Nipeic Tol." <br><br>After this work, the guinea pigs were asked to rate how thirsty they were and to choose what drink they would order, between Lipton Ice and a popular local brand of mineral water called Spa Rood, if they were sitting on a cafe terrace. <br><br>Those who rated themselves thirsty were likelier to choose Lipton Ice, but only if they had received the subliminal message. <br><br>In a second study, the team recruited 105 volunteers, and got half of them to eat a very salty sweet before the same tasks. <br><br>Eighty percent of those who were thirsty and who had been exposed to the Lipton Ice message chose that product. By comparison, only 20 percent of those who were thirsty and who were in the control group chose Lipton Ice. <br><br>In addition, the thirstier a volunteer was, the likelier he or she was to choose Lipton Ice. <br><br>Those who were not thirsty were only slightly likely to choose that product, which suggests "priming only works when the prime is goal-relevant," lead researcher Johan Karremans told New Scientist. <br><br>The team's next step is to see how long-lasting the subliminal effects are. <br><br>The report appears in this Saturday's issue of the British science weekly. The detailed study is published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. <br> <p></p><i></i>
