What subliminal marketing can do to you

Studies have shown that everyday, each of us is subject to about 10,000 marketing messages, brands, logos and product offers. 10,000? Yes, that’s a huge number but when you think about it, it’s probably close to reality. Let’s see for a minute.

You wake up and turn off your SONY alarm clock, go to the bathroom and brush your teeth with your BRAUN electric toothbrush and use some COLGATE toothpaste. While you’re brushing, you look unconsciously look around you and see your HUGO BOSS cologne, your NIVEA lotion. You turn on your LG TV or your PIONEER radio and hear a commercial for Mossy NISSAN, another commercial for PAPA JOHN’S, and another commercial for BANK OF AMERICA. You get a SMS on your APPLE iPhone; it’s actually a special offer from MCDONALD’S because you agreed to receive SMS alerts from them. You make some STARBUCK’S coffee in your BODUM French press. It’s time to go to work. You grab your keys and walk through the parking lot. You walk by a FORD, a TOYOTA, a BUICK, a KIA, an AUDI (that’s mine;-). You get in, turn on the radio and hear 5 commercials for BUDWEISER, GEICO, BEST BUY, TARGET, and T-MOBILE. You drive off the parking lot and that’s when the marketing hammering really starts. You drive by hundreds of different cars (different brands), some of them with stickers for various brand names, you pass hundreds of billboards. OK, let’s stop here. I think you get it.

How much do you think you saw of all this? None? Guess again. Reality is you saw most of it, even if you’re not aware of it. Scary, huh!? But that’s what marketing is all about. It’s not because you didn’t read the billboard that your brain didn’t register the information. When you drive by this billboard, your eyes just lay on it without reading it, but your brain is smarter than you (haha) and takes a picture of the billboard, processes it in the background and register all the information without letting you know. Then you go to the store and without thinking about it, you grab some Gatorade. Why Gatorade? Maybe because it’s your favorite drink? Or maybe because you heard 21 commercials about it within the last week, saw 15 football teams with the Gatorade logos on their bottles, or maybe you just really like it… No! You don’t just really like it. You’ve been somewhat brainwashed by marketing genius to think you really like it.

I am writing all this because I read my friend’s blog post about subliminal marketing and there was this amazing, yet scary video about subliminal marketing. When marketers get caught at their own games, you know it’s solid!

These are some of the basics of marketing. I remember my first class of marketing in Business School. The teacher asked: “what is the goal of marketing?”. Most answers were: “advertising a product”, or “selling products”. The right answer is that the goal of marketing is to create a need! Do you really an iPhone? I mean, your old BlackBerry Pearl pretty much does it all. Well, marketing creates this need for the iPhone. And they’re so good at it they even make you wait for hours in line to get it…