Subliminal Messaging and Neuromarketing in the Social Imagination...

 

“Neuromarketing” loosely refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers' motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas. 

Where or in what field of knowledge/science did neuromarketing get its start? In psychology of course;... it was originally communicated as the principles of subliminal messaging. The director of Yale Psychology laboratory Ph.D. E. W. Scripture published The New Psychology in 1897 (The Walter Scott Ltd, London), which described the basic principles of subliminal messages. 

In 1900, Knight Dunlap, an American professor of psychology, flashed an "imperceptible shadow" to subjects while showing them a Müller-Lyer illusion containing two lines with pointed arrows at both ends which create an illusion of different lengths. Dunlap claimed that the shadow influenced his subjects subliminally in their judgment of the lengths of the lines.

Although these results were not verified in a scientific study, American psychologist Harry Levi Hollingworth reported in an advertising textbook that such subliminal messages could be used by advertisers.

During World War II, the tachistoscope, an instrument which projects pictures for an extremely brief period, was used to train soldiers to recognize enemy airplanes. Today the tachistoscope is used to increase reading speed or to test sight. 

After the war, in 1957, market researcher James Vicary claimed that quickly flashing messages on a movie screen, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, had influenced people to purchase more food and drinks. Vicary coined the term subliminal advertising and formed the Subliminal Projection Company based on a six-week test. 

Vicary claimed that during the presentation of the movie Picnic he used a tachistoscope to project the words "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat popcorn" for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals. Vicary asserted that during the test, sales of popcorn and Coke in that New Jersey theater increased 57.8 percent and 18.1 percent respectively.  

However, in 1962 Vicary admitted to lying about the experiment and falsifying the results, the story itself being a marketing ploy. An identical experiment conducted by Dr. Henry Link showed no increase in cola or popcorn sales. [https://psychology.wikia.or/wiki/History_of_subliminal_perception_research]

Now, as I stated at the very top, neuromarketing got its start in psychology. It is a tool used largely in advertising. It is rooted in subliminal messaging. Why do psychologist give people the Rorschach test? They give this psychological test because subjects' perceptions of inkblots reveal a lot of information. Those perceptions are thus recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. 

Indeed, that is the basis of neuromarketing and it is effective. Symbols, images, colors, sayings, gestures, and simple words are all considered relevant data that feed and shape our identity and when used in ways to motivate us do sway us to think and behavior one way over. another. This is true for all human societies. But, more recently also in other areas including political science and even in health care...namely by big pharmaceuticals. 

Neuromarketing is a tool for commercial marketing communication as it readily applies neuropsychology to market research. It is used to study what makes people think or tik...and that most certainly translates as consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and effective response to marketing stimuli. 

The potential benefits is enormous to marketers include more efficient and effective marketing campaigns and strategies which means fewer product and campaign failures, and ultimately the manipulation of the real needs and wants of people to suit the needs and wants of marketing interests.

Sure, neuromarketing is an expensive approach as it requires advanced equipment and technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), motion capture for eye-tracking, and the electroencephalogram. A lot of things can be expensive the first time.

Remember, once a rat follows the cheese through a maze, it will always follow the cheese. Hence, given the amount of new learning from neuroscience and marketing research, marketers have begun applying neuromarketing best practices without needing to engage in expensive testing.

This pseudoscience as some refer to it does have real applications and is being employed daily. In some respects, after years and years of this, one might not even be able to tell good from evil, right from wrong information... and that makes one wonder if reality, the social imagination of it, will be changed entirely to suit an agenda that will control the what was once a free-willing social imagination generating a common among us 'free' society. 

Even in saying that, one could already make the argument that we never really had a free will... Emile Durkheim called our experience of society a sui generis existence... According to Durkheim, it would be a social imagination controlled from the top down. And, because of that, the wider social imagination becomes a strict collective that grows like a mushroom until the source of truth is lost in the ever expanding of growth of misinformation.