EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Drink coca-cola, eat popcorn, and choose powerade: testing the limits of subliminal persuasion

Laura Smarandescu () and Terence Shimp

Marketing Letters, 2015, vol. 26, issue 4, 715-726

Abstract: Research by marketing/advertising scholars has yielded anything but definitive results when testing whether subliminal advertising is capable of persuading consumers. Recent research in social cognition has provided impressive evidence that subliminally priming brand names affects individuals’ attitudes, choices, and behaviors. In the spirit of replication and boundary-condition testing, we conducted three studies to examine whether subliminally priming brand names remains successful under more realistic marketplace conditions. Study 1 pits an underdog brand against a market share leader and demonstrates that subliminal priming significantly influences purchase intentions when consumers are in an active thirst state. Study 2 examines the boundary conditions of this effect on brand choice in a simulated store environment and also obtains a significant priming effect when consumers are in an active thirst state. However, this effect is nullified in study 3 that is structurally parallel to study 2 but which adds a 15-min time delay between the prime and the choice task. The resultant null effect questions the ability of subliminal priming to persuade consumers under more realistic marketplace conditions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Subliminal advertising; Priming; Persuasion; Motivation; Replication; Boundary-condition testing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11002-014-9294-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:mktlet:v:26:y:2015:i:4:p:715-726

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... etailsPage=societies

DOI: 10.1007/s11002-014-9294-1

Access Statistics for this article

Marketing Letters is currently edited by Joel Steckel and Peter Golder

More articles in Marketing Letters from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2023-11-13
Handle: RePEc:kap:mktlet:v:26:y:2015:i:4:p:715-726