The abundance of marketing in everyday living could have been better for customers in September 1957. Nevertheless, the idea that marketers planned to take away consumers' free will by appealing to their subconscious was a lot to bear. During movie screenings, ads like "Eat popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" were displayed briefly, far below the barrier for conscious perception, according to James M. Vicary and Francis Thayer.
According to Vicary and Thayer, this subliminal persuasion strategy raised popcorn sales by 57.5% and cola sales by 18.1%. Consumers were purportedly motivated to purchase extra snacks at the movies by some invisible stimuli. The ramifications were staggering: anyone with enough money to buy television space for subliminal advertising could influence an unknowing population. Politicians could employ subliminal advertising to win elections. Since there was no way to tell whether commercials were being aired, even a suspicious public could be vulnerable to subliminal marketing.
One example of a larger class of occurrences that can be categorized as implicit consumer cognition is the idea of subliminal advertising. Consider implicit cognition in general before discussing the more specific implicit consumer cognition. The influence of prior experience on a task without conscious recall or knowledge of the impacting event is a sign of implicit cognition. Recent years have seen a significant expansion of the study of implicit cognition beyond memory, including the study of social and customer cognition. Implicit consumer cognition is the unrecognized or incorrectly identified influence of prior experience on consumer-related judgment and behavior.
Several ways that consumer thinking may be tacit include: Customers might not be aware of a biassing stimulus (as in the case of subliminal advertising), they might not be aware of the cognitive mechanisms mediating the link between a stimulus and a result, or they might not be aware of the actual result. However, to what extent are consumer behaviors influenced by factors and procedures that we are unaware of?
Years of study have reliably demonstrated how explicit cognition affects consumer behavior. Various models of human cognition have characterized humans as naive scientists (making careful, semi-scientific efforts to comprehend the universe around them), perceptual misers (having limited cognitive capacity and usually reluctant to outlay total intellectual energy), and motivated tacticians (having multiple tools for analysis including using them as per motivation and ability). Despite their many variances, all these theories assume explicit cognition's value. Humans actively and purposefully digest information, frequently making the right choices. According to studies on attitude change, for instance, persons who are both driven and can carefully consider persuasive material tend to accept strong arguments and reject weak ones.
Of course, significant cognitive elaboration is optional for persuasion. Individuals can also be influenced by lightly analyzing peripheral stimuli (e.g., an attractive model may inspire pleasant thoughts towards a brand) or by evoking heuristics (e.g., a highly credible source would only endorse a good product). However, allocating even a small portion of our mental skills to all our daily inputs is undoubtedly challenging, given our meager cognitive resources and sheer volume. A recent burst in the investigation into implicit cognition has continued to show how unconscious mental operations can significantly influence judgment and behavior.
It makes sense to interpret implicit attitude measures using this information processing style for several reasons. First, the kind of information processing that a measure taps may be directly tied to the kind of behavior that the measure might be used to predict. Similar to implicit measures, behaviors can range from spontaneous to deliberate. We may anticipate that spontaneously triggered attitudes drive some behaviors, and other behaviors are driven by more deliberately considered attitudes, according to Fazio's MODE model of attitude-behavior linkages. A measure might be expected to forecast more spontaneous behavior to the extent that it taps automatic processing.
Explicit measurements call for the respondent to consciously access some stored data about themselves. Respondents are required to access accumulated evaluative data about a particular attitude object to complete explicit attitude measures like the Likert, Thurstone, or semantic differential measures. In explicit personality tests, respondents are asked to judge how correctly different attribute terms or behaviors reflect their personalities. The conventional wisdom holds that when respondents are able and ready to reflect on their psychological conditions, explicit measures work best.
When used to measure attitudes or personal characteristics that respondents are conscious of and are unaffected by social desirability issues, explicit measures should be acceptable. Conversely, explicit measures are regarded as of relatively little use when the thing being studied is socially undesirable (such as prejudice or attitudes towards cheating). The prevailing thinking would support applying implicit or indirect measurements when individuals are unable or reluctant to reveal their genuine attitudes.
Evaluate respondents' stored data |
Don't need respondents to actively seek out data |
Details of respondents deduced from responses |
Negates social desirability |
Are indirect measurements |
Used when individuals are unable or reluctant to reveal genuine attitudes |
Implicit measures also evaluate respondents' stored data, but they do not need the respondents to seek out the data actively. Instead, details about the respondent are deduced from their answers to tasks or questions that purport to have nothing to do with their mental state (attitude, trait, etc.).
The Thematic Apperception Test is a well-known illustration of implicit measurements. The TAT is a projective test that asks responders to write a brief narrative about each of a series of confusing images. The story is then evaluated by skilled coders based on predetermined standards, giving the respondent a mark on the aspect of interest. Due to misconceptions regarding their poor validity and reliability, projective implicit assessments have lost popularity. Modern implicit measures emphasize how quickly respondents can complete specific tasks, such as classifying words or judging whether a word is a non-word. These tests include the evaluative priming paradigm and the implicit association test. Even though both projective-type measurements and response-time-based measures can be implicit, they appear to be very different in terms of the manner of knowledge comprehension each necessitates.
The shortcomings of self-report measurements have drawn more attention to what are now known as "implicit" measures of social cognition. The Implicit Association Test, also known as the IAT, is the most modern, reliable, and well-liked of these new assessments. The IAT is a categorization task that is computer-based and intended to test the relative strengths of associations between notions in memory without forcing the participant to reflect on their thinking. The IAT produces significant effect sizes, is simple to use, and is highly reliable.
The IAT was initially developed to measure implicit attitudes, but researchers have since broadened its uses to include self-concept, biases, self-esteem, latent egocentrism, and underlying partisanship measurements. Utilization of the IAT in consumer research is an apparent and feasible potential because many of these ideas are frequently used in consumer behavior research.
The magnitude to which subliminal processes influence consumer behavior remains an open research subject. Due to the overwhelming amount of potentially priming stimuli in most shopping environments, some have contended that inferential comprehension is unlikely to explain much of the variation in consumer preference and decision-making. This is because all potential priming stimuli would cancel one another out.
Furthermore, they contend that consumer choice and conscious, deliberate information processing models are particularly effective at forecasting behavior. At this time, it seems highly improbable that an investigation of unconscious impacts can explain choices as effectively as the premise that decisions are influenced mainly by the conscious analysis of task-relevant data.
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