Marketing Psychology
Sep 21st, 2010 by erickyao
Last year, while seating in my Psychology class, I learned something rather interesting about marketing. A research has been conducted to test the behaviour of a randomly selected audience. A commercial was shown to the audience and, occasionally, random words such as “Coke” or “Lemonade” popped out for a fraction of seconds. Later on, subjects were asked whether they have seen those words, and most of them have reported that they did not. Following the commercial, they were asked to complete multiple irrelevant activities such as reading, playing chess, etc. for an hour. Water and coke were placed in front of them. Results revealed that people exposed to words such as “Coke” during the commercial are more likely to drink coke when they are thirsty. I have probably missed a lot of details including other factors that determined this behavior but the conclusion that I wanted to make was that some companies can market their products in ways that consumers would not even be aware of. This marketing strategy can be effective but scary in a way, which can potentially bring up ethical issues.