Conscious, but not unconscious, logo priming of brands and related words

Abstract

This study assessed whether real-life stimulus material can elicit conscious and unconscious priming. A typical masked priming paradigm was used, with brand logo primes. We used a rigorous method to assess participants' awareness of the subliminal information. Our results show that shortly presented and masked brand logos (e.g., logo of McDonald's) have the power to prime their brand names (e.g., "McDonald's") and, remarkably, words associated to the brand (e.g., "hamburger"). However, this only occurred when the logos could be categorized clearly above the consciousness threshold. Once the primes were presented close to the consciousness threshold, no subliminal influences on behavior were observed.

Short- and Long-Term Effects of Conscious, Minimally Conscious and Unconscious Brand Logos

“…The prime stimuli consisted of five brand logos selected from the stimulus set from Brintazzoli et al [9]. This stimulus set contained 10 brand logos and from these we selected the 5 logos that elicited the strongest conscious and unconscious priming effects in this previous study (i.e., the logos of McDonald's, Mercedes, Telenet, Nike and Apple, see [9] for the exact stimuli).…”

“…This stimulus set contained 10 brand logos and from these we selected the 5 logos that elicited the strongest conscious and unconscious priming effects in this previous study (i.e., the logos of McDonald's, Mercedes, Telenet, Nike and Apple, see [9] for the exact stimuli). A pilot study indicated that these logos are highly familiar and easily recognizable for the target population (see [9]). The dimensions of the picture stimuli ranged from 2.9 cm to 3.2 cm in width and 1.4 cm to 3.5 cm in height.…”

“…However, a first major challenge for studies examining unconscious perception is providing sufficient and reliable evidence that the information was indeed presented below the conscious threshold. Abovementioned studies, examining unconscious perception in advertising (e.g., [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]) use subjective report and/or prime identification as a method for assessing prime awareness, which both have been criticized for underestimating prime awareness [see [9] for a more extensive discussion].…”

“…A typical masked priming paradigm [24] was used where brand logo primes (see also [9]) preceded letter string targets, which had to be categorized as words or meaningless pseudo words. This masked priming task was followed by a strict objective prime awareness assessment.…”

Subliminal Cueing of Selection Behavior in a Virtual Environment

“…Furthermore, subliminal priming is shown to be modulated by temporal (Naccache, Blandin, & Dehaene, 2002) and spatial attention (Kiefer & Brendel, 2006;Ortells, Frings, & Plaza-Ayllon, 2012). The short-lived nature of the effect of masked subliminal cues imposes additional constraints on the time window in which cueing will be effective in realistic environments (Gaillard et al, 2009;Kouider, Berthet, & Faivre, 2011;Brintazzoli, Soetens, Deroost, & Van den Bussche, 2012).…”