Frequently Asked Marketing Question

How does subliminal advertising work? Any successful examples?


Answer: Research in marketing has shown that subliminal advertising does not work. In careful studies, subliminal perceptions has had no effect on motives like hunger. Nor does it have an effect consumer's attitudes or preferences.

This has been highly controversial, in part, due to to flawed research by advertisers who showed this effect long ago. The mechanism thought to effect this potential effect was based on subliminal perception, or the concept of a perceptual threshold. You can read about these effects in any basic consumer behavior book in marketing (check out our books, especially the one by Hoyer and MacInnis).

We hope this helps (we know you were looking for something that would show a positive effect for subliminal advertising - everyone is - but we here at MarketingProfs.com try to give you what has been found in solid academic research).

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