What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [85]
It is a deeply held belief of marketers that scented advertising works subliminally. For example, according to Sue Brush, senior vice president of Westin Hotels & Resorts, the chain’s White Tea fragrance is “one of those subliminal things you don’t necessarily advertise, but we hope it can help guests decompress after the rigors of the road.” Enthusiasts and detractors both believe that scent marketing is a form of mind control that operates in the murky zone of the subliminal, where a well-placed whisper is all that’s required to set off psychological chain reaction resulting, inevitably, in an opening of the consumer’s wallet.
ACCORDING TO THE PSYCHOLOGIST Anthony Pratkanis, popular enthusiasm for the subliminal has come in waves. The first arrived in 1957, when James Vicary claimed to have shown subliminal ads in a movie theater. Vicary said his messages—“eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola”—boosted Coke sales in the lobby by 18.1 percent and popcorn sales by 57.7 percent. In the Cold War era preoccupied with the brainwashing of soldiers and secret agents, Vicary’s claim generated enormous media coverage. Yet Vicary couldn’t or wouldn’t produce his data. Nor would he show anyone the tachistoscope he allegedly used to flash the ads onto the movie screen. He eventually admitted to Advertising Age that he fabricated the study to draw attention to his consulting business.
A second subliminal wave began in 1973, when Wilson B. Key published Subliminal Seduction, in which he claimed that sexually arousing images were hidden in printed advertisements. (This led to a brief fad at parties in the mid-1970s, where people squinted at whiskey ads in Esquire, looking for a sex orgy in the ice cube.) The original studies cited by Key were flimsy and lacked critical control groups. Though his theories were roundly dismissed by psychologists, Key—now an elderly man—continues to see penises embedded in advertising images wherever he looks.
The third and most recent wave of the subliminal fad came in the late 1980s and early 1990s with self-help audio tapes that promised everything from weight reduction to increased self-esteem. Driven partly by late-night infomercials, subliminal tapes became a $50-million industry, even though little or no scientific evidence existed that they worked as claimed.
It’s clear that we can absorb visual and auditory information without being consciously aware of it. Whether these fleeting perceptions affect our behavior as directly and purposefully as subliminal-advertising proponents claim is another story. Anthony Pratkanis finds no evidence that they do. I believe the same holds true for smell. There is, for example, solid evidence for subliminal odor perception. The German researcher Thomas Hummel snaked a millimeter-wide tube about three inches up the noses of volunteers. (Actually, he let them do it themselves—it’s less stressful.) The tube delivered a constant stream of warmed and humidified air, along with occasional pulses of odor, directly to the sensory surface of the nose. A wire inside the tube monitored electrical activity from the same surface. Scents too weak to be consciously detected nevertheless provoked a response in the sensory cells of the nose. Using different techniques, other researchers have observed the brain responding to scent at levels too low for the test subject to reliably detect. There is little question that odors can be registered subconsciously in the nose and the brain.
Psychologists in the Netherlands took techniques used to measure the indirect effects of subliminal sights and sounds and applied them to olfaction. They gave people an incidental exposure to the citrus scent of a familiar all-purpose cleanser. Most participants were unaware of the smell and of the purpose of the experiment. Yet those who inhaled the scent were faster at picking out cleaning-related words from a list, and were more likely to mention cleaning-related behaviors when asked to