Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [33]
Subliminal messaging has even been shown to influence how much we are willing to pay for a product. Recently, two researchers demonstrated that brief exposure to images of smiling or frowning faces for sixteen milliseconds—not long enough for volunteers to consciously register the image or identify the emotion—affected the amount of money test subjects were willing to pay for a beverage. When subjects saw flashes of smiling faces, they poured significantly more drink from a pitcher—and were willing to pay twice as much for it—than when they viewed the angry faces. The researchers termed this effect “unconscious emotion,” meaning that a minute emotional change had taken place without the subjects being aware of either the stimulus that caused it or any shift in their emotional states. In other words, smiling faces can subconsciously get us to buy more stuff, suggesting that store managers who instruct their employees to smile are on the right track.10
Or consider this: the origin of a product may even subconsciously influence how likely we are to buy it. Recently, I was called to Germany to help a struggling perfume brand regain its footing in the market. When I glanced at the bottle to see where the fragrance was manufactured, I noted that instead of the typical glamorous cities (New York, London, Paris) most perfume-makers print on their canisters, the company had listed decidedly less glamorous ones. Now, Düsseldorf and Oberkochen may be fantastic places to live, but most consumers don’t associate them with sophistication, sensuality, or any other swanky qualities we look for in a fragrance. Among other things, I convinced the company to replace those cities with ones we all dream about taking long, bewitching vacations in (we weren’t lying; the company did have offices in Paris, London, New York, and Rome)—and sales shot up almost instantly.
But the power of subliminal advertising has little to do with the product itself. Instead, it lies in our own brains. In 2005, a University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral student by the name of Sean Polyn used fMRI to study the ways in which the brain hunts down specific memories. Volunteers were shown approximately ninety images in three separate categories: famous faces (Halle Berry, Jack Nicholson), well-known places (e.g., the Taj Mahal), and common everyday objects (such as nail clippers). As the subjects’ brains registered the assortment of images, Polyn asked them to place the image in question in a distinguishing mental context. For example, did they love or loathe Jack Nicholson? Would they ever be remotely interested in paying a visit to the Taj Mahal?
A short time later, Polyn asked the volunteers to recall the images. As the subjects’ brains scrambled to retrieve them, they exhibited the precise same pattern of brain activity that was present when their brains had first formed the impression. In fact, Polyn and his team found evidence that the subjects were able to recall what category—celebrities, famous places, everyday items—the image was in before they could even recall the name of the image, suggesting that the human brain is capable of recalling images before those images register in our consciousness.
But even if the brain can summon information that lies beneath our level of consciousness, does that mean that this information necessarily informs our behavior? That’s what the next brain scan experiment would help us find out. Our subjects were, once again, twenty smokers from the United Kingdom. But this