Brand advertisers who strive to improve metrics like "ad recall" may be focusing on the wrong measures of success. A new study adds more weight to the argument that brand impressions that aren't consciously perceived do, in fact, affect brand preferences.
In May, a study will be presented at the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco that shows how unconscious brand exposure affects consumer preferences. The lead researcher, Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy of Denmark's Copenhagen Business School, describes the work:
30 women were subliminally exposed to brands prior to evaluating fashion clothing. What we found was that women’s own brand preferences impacted on their ratings of the clothing – despite that they had not seen the brands consciously...
The study demonstrates that brand equity can trigger emotional responses even during unconscious exposure, and then carry on to affect preference of products.
The subliminal exposures were created by exposing the subjects to the brand for 32 milliseconds, or about three hundreths of a second. Although the subjects were not consciously aware of this exposure, eye monitoring gear showed that their pupils dilated slightly when they saw brands they liked or disliked. This pupil reaction indicated an emotional response to the liked/disliked brands.
The famous Vicary "Eat Popcorn!" experiment, popularized in Vance Packard's 1957 best-seller The Hidden Persuaders, proved to be a fraud. Nevertheless, since those early days plenty of academic research has shown that subliminal messaging can, in fact, alter preferences. In Subliminal Messages Work!, I describe experiments conducted by Bahador Bahrami of the University College of London. Using fMRI brain scans, Bahrami showed that subjects's brains reacted to stimuli presented too quickly for conscious processing. And, in Subliminal Branding in Milliseconds, I discuss how even a mere 5 milliseconds of exposure to novel symbols caused subjects to prefer those symbols to ones they had not "seen."
Implications For Advertisers
So, should you start embedding subliminal branding messages in viral videos? It's an interesting concept, but one that's legally and ethically questionable. The brand damage that would result from the inevitable exposure of such a strategy would certainly undo any minor lift in brand preference achieved by the hidden messages.
The real message is that brand impressions count, even when they aren't consciously processed. If you can include your brand name or imagery in places where exposures will keep adding up, the cumulative effect may exceed that of more prominent advertising. Samsung is a brand that seems to love airports. The giant Samsung billboard you pass as you approach the airport may indeed get your attention. But, the little Samsung logos on hundreds of luggage carts wheeling around the airport may well have a bigger impact despite their inconspicuous ubiquity.
Good News for Small Business
The most powerful tools for building brands - Super Bowl ads and massive media campaigns, for example - are available only to the largest companies. The concept that even unconscious exposure to a brand can still build preference suggests that far less costly techniques can be effective.
One area product makers can control is the product itself. Think of all those glowing Apple logos on the back side of their laptop screens... most of us probably don't notice them, but every one of those is a brand impression.
So, if you are building a brand, you should certainly do the big things you need to get noticed and build a reputation. But, at the same time, look for the little things you can do to deliver repeated, small exposures to your brand. Even if your consumers don't pay attention or even seem to notice, those impressions can have a measurable impact.
Roger Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011). Find Roger on Twitter as @rogerdooley and at his website, Neuromarketing.
