Impact of Subliminal Messages on Consumer Behavior: A Fresh Look into the Future

Abstract

Since time immemorial, subliminal advertisement has continued to haunt the society and especially after James Vicary’s experiment at New Jersey, it reached a new height. Since then, there has been much argument about whether this can be an efficient technique of marketing communications. Decades of research has gone into establishing or abolishing this technique. But no satisfactory evidence, so far, has been provided by any researcher on either pole. While researches on subliminal advertisement are fewer in number, this study does a critical review of such available works and argues without any bias that subliminal advertising cannot be an effective tool to persuade the consumers to pursue any goal, as desired by the marketers. While the current study examines the proposed topic in the light of researches, it also deals with psychological aspects that prompt certain behavior. Such aspects deal with the role of mere exposure, threshold concepts and their subsequent effect on behavior. All these aspects have been given their theoretical treatments and their implications in research have been discussed. While asserting the central proposition, this study indicates both the theoretical and practical problems that do not make subliminal advertisements an effective tool of marketing. In the concluding part, this study points out the future research directions that can have desired results and can qualify itself as an alternative to traditional marketing practices.

Keywords: Subliminal advertising, mere exposure, sub-conscious processing, threshold

JEL Classification: B30, B31, C90, C91, C92, D91, M30, M31, M37, M39