A study has suggested that the human brain makes associations with things unconsciously "seen", thereby influencing our behaviour when thinking about advertised products.

 

Prof. Gerald Gorn

Prof. Gerald Gorn, Chair Professor of Marketing at the PolyU Faculty of Business, and Ms Maria Galli from the Department of Economics and Business at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain used two experiments to investigate the impact of subliminal advertising on brand perceptions.

In experiment 1, participants were presented on a computer screen with a Chinese ideograph very rapidly paired with the word "black" and another ideograph with the word "white", with only the words consciously seen. Then, they performed a lexical decision task by seeing a string of letters and indicating instantly whether the string formed a real word. In experiment 2, the participants were asked to designate two potential new brand names (with Chinese ideographs), which had been subliminally paired with black and white in the previous experiment, for either cola or soymilk products.

Results of the experiments showed that attitudinal responses to ideographs (brand names) varied with the appropriateness of their associated attribute for the specific beverage ("black" matching cola and "white" matching soymilk). These findings suggest that semantic associations learned unconsciously have significant and meaningful consequences during brand naming. Even though most participants were not aware of seeing the ideographs, they still unconsciously applied the meaning associated with each of them "correctly".

Named the best article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2011, the co-authored paper "Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands" based on this study was awarded the Park Outstanding Contributor Award in 2014 by the Society for Consumer Psychology. ♦