Sometimes, it’ll involve words or images being flashed on a screen so briefly that you don’t detect them consciously (try 0.003 seconds).

Potentially convincing people to buy your product or service through subliminal advertising can be done in a number of different ways. By one definition, it is: 'The use by advertisers of images and sounds to influence consumers’ responses without their being consciously aware of it.'’ (The study the claim was based on was later discredited.) Subliminal Advertising: A DefinitionĪccording to Campaign magazine, ‘the definition of subliminal advertising is quite broad. Subliminal messaging in ads was first introduced as a concept by James Vickery, and then by Vance Packard in his book from 1952, The Hidden Persuaders, which claimed that Coca-Cola had used subliminal advertising in cinemas to drive sales of drinks and popcorn. So, a subliminal message is one that’s bypassing your conscious mind, but being picked up by your subconscious. There’s no formal agreement on how fast the subconscious mind is, but scientists posit that it can process up to 500,000 times more than the conscious mind is able to.

So that’s the amount of ‘bandwidth’ you have for paying conscious attention to at any given time. The human body sends around 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing its capacity has been estimated by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky at 120 bits per second. As the subconscious, or unintentional aspect of your mind represents around 90% of your total brain function, it’s clearly way more powerful than your conscious mind when it comes to processing information. You can picture your subconscious mind in the same way as an iceberg, with far more of its mass below the surface than above. Subliminal messages are below the threshold of conscious perception. They’re often put into songs, films or adverts, as they can be used to enhance the persuasiveness of something – or convey something else entirely. A subliminal message is an audio or visual stimuli that’s not perceived by your conscious mind.

Subliminal perception in marketing